Curious supervisor puts team innovation within reach: Investigating supervisor trait curiosity as a catalyst for collective actions

Popular press and theoretical conjecture imply that curiosity is not just an individual motivation but also an enabler of collective actions. This study seeks to explicate curiosity as a catalyst for collective actions by examining team supervisors’ trait curiosity. We test the idea that trait curiosity predisposes team supervisors to manipulate team-level task structures, which primes certain forms of team regulatory focus and eventually affects team innovation. Two studies using the interest/deprivation (I/D) taxonomy of curiosity revealed that, by predisposing supervisors to create more learning demand, I-type curiosity primes team promotion focus, which facilitates both radical and incremental team innovation. By predisposing supervisors to create more problem-solving demand, d-type curiosity arouses team prevention focus, which facilitates team incremental innovation but hinders radical innovation. The effect of supervisor curiosity is evident only when supervisors have high task authority. This study uncovered a powerful property of curiosity, demonstrating its promising contributions to organizational life.