ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Organ. Psychol.
Sec. Performance and Development
Volume 3 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/forgp.2025.1576922
Examining the Impact Mechanism of Intra-team Co-opetition on Employee Creative Deviance
Provisionally accepted
- 1Nantong University, Nantong, China
- 2Second Affiliated Hospital of Nantong University, Nantong, Jiangsu Province, China
- 3Ginling College, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
- 4Hunan University of Arts and Science, Changde, Hunan, China
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Background: Creative deviance is key to producing breakthrough innovations and maintaining core competencies for a team. In contrast, intra-team co-opetition, an important influence on the allocation of team resources, may affect employees' creative deviance.Methods: This study analyzed the impact mechanism of intra-team co-opetition on employee creative deviance based on the conservation of resources theory. We collected data from 205 employees in scenario experiment and 354 employees in the questionnaire.The findings of polynomial regression and response surface analysis indicate that consistency in competition and cooperation within teams can lead to lesser knowledge power loss. When competition and cooperation levels within teams are inconsistent, they may not be able to attain their intended results. Furthermore, we found that when competition and cooperation levels within teams are inconsistent, knowledge power loss in the "low competition-high cooperation" combination was lower than the "high competition-low cooperation" combination. Thus, knowledge power loss can mediate between intra-team co-opetition and employee creative deviance.This study reveals the micro-mechanism of different combinations of co-opetition within the team，enriches the research results in the field of co-opetition and creative deviance, and provides reference for promoting team innovation performance and emerging more breakthrough innovation achievements.
Keywords: intra-team co-opetition, Creative deviance, knowledge power loss, Polynomial regression, Scenario experiment
Received: 21 Feb 2025; Accepted: 14 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Zhang, Lin, Wang, Zhang, He and Nie. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Siyu He, Ginling College, Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China
Zitong Nie, Hunan University of Arts and Science, Changde, 415000, Hunan, China
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.