Joint Decision-Making and Team Outcomes: Examining Cross-Lagged Relationships and the Roles of Psychological Safety and Participative Leadership

Despite increasing studies on team creativity, the relationship between joint decision-making and team creativity needs further exploration. Our study employs social exchange theory to investigate the potential bidirectional association between joint decision-making and team psychological safety while also exploring the role of participative leadership as a contextual constraint on this relationship. Through our analysis, we aim to shed light on the vital role of team psychological safety in mediating the moderating effect of participative leadership on the linkage between joint decision-making and team creativity. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 372 employees in 75 teams with a time-lagged research design. Our results demonstrated that joint decision-making is positively related to team psychological safety, and participative leadership strengthened the association between joint decision-making and team psychological safety and the association between joint decision-making and team creativity via team psychological safety. Overall, our findings suggest that team creativity could be improved if leaders can enhance their participative behaviors and identify appropriate channels for employees to feel psychologically safe in the workplace.