The Benefits of Redundancy: External Contact Duplication, Information Sharing, and Team Creativity

Scholars generally assume that non-redundant social relationships facilitate creativity while redundant ones constrain it. This paper demonstrates that redundant external relationships can, in fact, benefit team creativity. Adopting a team composition view, rather than a team global view, we introduce a new conceptualization of redundancy, namely external contact duplication, which captures the degree to which individual team members have the same external contacts. Drawing on team information processing and social network research, we highlight the previously overlooked information processing benefits of redundancy for team creativity in terms of social validation of external information and common ground between team members and external contacts. We hypothesize that external contact duplication stimulates intra-team external information sharing (the dissemination of externally acquired information among team members), which in turn fosters team creativity. We found support for our hypotheses in a sample of 72 work teams. Moreover, we found that team tenure moderated this indirect effect by weakening the relationship between external contact duplication and intra-team external information sharing. Overall, our study suggests a more nuanced understanding of structural redundancy and highlights an alternative mechanism through which it influences team creativity.