Although teams are increasingly tasked with creative work, enabling them to deliver outcomes that are novel and useful remains challenging. Team literature on antecedents of creativity is informative with regards to moderators taxing antecedent-outcome relationships such that they inverse an otherwise desirable effect. However, research also reveals that the positive potential of some antecedents of creative work diminishes and even turns negative when taken too far. Despite the empirical evidence supporting such curvilinear effects on important outcomes of creative work at the individual and team levels, the theorizing behind them unfortunately remains rather incomplete such that theoretical attention has been paid more to the upward than to the downward slopes of such curves. By synthesizing 117 quantitative-empirical studies on curvilinear effects with help of a multilevel antecedent-benefit-cost (ABC) framework, the present literature review guides this field of research toward more conceptual clarity and methodological precision across levels. This is important because the cost-related mechanisms of certain antecedents—which start outweighing the benefit-related mechanisms once they have reached their threshold magnitude—are still not well understood. Without such a more balanced account of benefits and costs, organizational behavior literature remains challenged in its ability to reliably inform organizational practice.