Effects of team diversity, emergent leadership, and shared leadership on team performance in a multi-stage innovation and creativity crowdsourcing competition

In recent years, companies have tended to use student competitions to obtain innovative ideas or proposals for solving problems. Through multi-stage competition, the coordination and operation of the team members gain in importance as teams deal with the different tasks in the different stages of the competition. Previous studies have shown that leadership positively impacts team performance in a formal organization. However, leadership functions differently between teams in organizations with formal leaders and teams in multi-stage innovation competitions with informal leaders. Little research has focused on student team leadership and team performance in student competitions. This study focuses on multi-stage innovation and creativity competitions and is intended to explore the effects of team diversity, emergent leadership, and shared leadership on team performance. Data were collected from 62 responses from 23 teams collected in a survey and were analyzed using the partial least squares method to test hypotheses. The findings show that (1) team diversity significantly impacts shared leadership, (2) emergent leadership significantly influences shared leadership at the individual but not at a team level, and (3) shared leadership significantly affects self-perceived team performance but not judgments from outsiders. Our study offers blueprints for firms to design and organize student competitions.