Antecedents of Team Creativity: An Examination of Team Emotional Intelligence, Team Trust and Collaborative Culture Gloria Barczak, Felicia Lassk and Jay Mulki Teams represent a dominant approach to getting work done in a business environment. Creativity enables teams to solve problems and leverage opportunities through the integration of divergent thoughts and perspectives. Prior research indicates that a collaborative culture, which affects how team members interact and work together, is a critical antecedent of team creativity. This study explores other antecedents of team creativity, namely, team emotional intelligence and team trust, and investigates the relationships among these precursors to creative effort. Using a survey of 82 student teams at a large university in the northeast United States, our findings suggest that team emotional intelligence promotes team trust. Trust, in turn, fosters a collaborative culture which enhances the creativity of the team. Cognitive trust also moderates the relationship between collaborative culture and team creativity. Implica- tions of these results for managers and academics are discussed. Introduction I n today’s business environment, much work is interdependent and so teams are a domi- nant means to getting work done. Research shows that firms value the ability of individu- als to work together (Kichuk & Wiesner, 1997). As well, in many organizations, creative capital is considered its greatest asset (Florida & Goodnight, 2005). In fact, some argue that the future success of many businesses relies on their ability to tap into the creative potential of their teams (Florida & Goodnight, 2005; Rego et al., 2007). For this article, we use Chen’s (2007) definition of teams as a group of indi- viduals where ‘talent, energy and skills are integrated into a team, and this collective capacity to innovate becomes greater than the sum of individual contributions’ (p. 239). So, how does an organization enhance the creativity of its teams? Prior research indicates that the quality of collaboration has a positive impact on creativity and team performance (Hoegl & Gemuenden, 2001; DeCusatis, 2008). Similarly, emotional intelligence has been touted as essential to the performance of a team (Druskat & Wolff, 2001a; Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee, 2002; Rego et al., 2007). Both individual and team emotional intelli- gence enhances a team’s ability to communi- cate with one another, to be receptive to diverging opinions and to utilize emotion to improve team decision making. Additionally, interpersonal (team) trust is one of the impor- tant elements for teamwork and is based both on emotional bonds and perceived competen- cies of individual members. In fact, Rigby, Gruver and Allen (2009) studied teamwork in the most innovative firms in the United States and identified trust as one of the seven impor- tant characteristics that fosters successful part- nership among diverse members of a team. When members trust each other it makes them feel less vulnerable, thus facilitating channel- ling energy on creating and discovering rather than defending (Gibb, 1978). Researchers state that in the current organizational environment of declining power of reciprocal obligations and hierarchical controls, trust is key to holding employees together as a cohesive unit (Kasper-Fuehrer & Ashkanasy, 2001; Bijlsma & Koopman, 2003). The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between team emotional 332 CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION MANAGEMENT Volume 19 Number 4 2010 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8691.2010.00574.x © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd