How to teach resourcefully? The mechanism of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity of college students

Teacher dialectical feedback reflects teachers’ dialectical thinking and accord with college students’ development rules, which is of great significance to boost students’ team creativity. Less attention, however, has been given to the influence of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity. Therefore, we expect to examine the effect of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity and explore the underlying mechanism. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a field survey and a longitudinal field experimental study. The results overall provided support for our theoretical model and showed that (1) teacher dialectical feedback was positively correlated with team creativity; (2) team information elaboration mediated the relationship between teacher dialectical feedback and team creativity; (3) the interaction between teacher dialectical feedback and mastery climate significantly predicted team information elaboration, such that the positive relationship between teacher dialectical feedback and team information elaboration was stronger when mastery climate was high rather than low; (4) performance climate also played a moderating role in the relationship between teacher dialectical feedback and team information elaboration, such that the positive relationship between teacher dialectical feedback and team information elaboration was weaker when mastery climate was high rather than low; (5) the indirect effect of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity through team information elaboration was significantly moderated by mastery climate and performance climate, such that when mastery climate was higher and performance climate was lower, the positive indirect effect is stronger, and vice versa. Drawing upon these findings, our work offers multiple contributions. First, this research expands the existing feedback paradigm and theoretical category of “education and development” by examining the effect of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity. Second, our study enriches the theory of creativity and broadens the antecedents of team creativity by exploring the effect and mechanism of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity. Third, this work provides novel insights into the mechanism through which teacher dialectical feedback influences team creativity from the perspective of team information processing. The results suggest that team information elaboration plays an important role for the effects of teacher dialectical feedback. Finally, by exploring the contingent role of team motivational climate, our study revealed the critical boundary condition for the effect of teacher dialectical feedback on team creativity, which provide a more integrative and accurate understanding of whether and when team performs more or less creativity as results of teacher dialectical feedback.