Talking about COVID-19 is positively associated with team cultural tightness: Implications for team deviance and creativity.

Qin, Xin; Yam, Kai Chi; Chen, Chen; Li, Wanlu; Dong, Xiaowei

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected everyone's work and daily life, and many employees are talking with their coworkers about this widespread pandemic on a regular basis. In this research, we examine how talking about crises such as COVID-19 at the team level affects team dynamics and behaviors. Drawing upon cultural tightness-looseness theory, we propose that talking about the COVID-19 crisis among team members is positively associated with team cultural tightness, which in turn benefits teams by decreasing team deviance but hurts teams by decreasing team creativity. Furthermore, we suggest that team virtuality moderates and weakens these indirect effects because face-to-face communication about COVID-19 is more powerful in influencing team cultural tightness than virtual communication. Results from a multisource, three-wave field study during the pandemic lend substantial support to these hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings and directions for future research. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).