"The Impact Of Team Conflict On Team Creativity:Evidence From Sri Lankan Telecommunications And Service Industries"

Organizations are increasingly relying on teams to respond creatively to rapidly changing marketplace demands and when people work together it.is inevitable that conflict will occur in the team work environment. Team conflict-team creativity has become most important study phenomena in organizational sciences. The prime objective of this research was to examine the impact of contextual factors on team conflict-team creativity relationship. This study examined the impact of collaborative conflict management, task interdependence, team competition, as moderating variables and information search, affective commitment as mediating variables in explaining the task, relationship conflict-team creativity relationship. For the purpose of this study, questionnaire was administered among89teams in telecommunication and service industries. Reliability of the scales and inter-rater agreement and intra class correlation were confirmed. The model was constructed to test the moderation, mediation and moderated mediation hypotheses including testing the relationship between variables. Descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analysis were performed to confirm the relationship between variables. In line with team conflict-team creativity relationship, the results found that task conflict was not significantly related to team creativity but relationship conflict was negatively related to team creativity significantly. In line with moderation and moderated mediation, study found that task interdependence moderated the relationship between task conflict and information search and also found that task interdependence moderated the relationship between task conflict and team creativity. It was also found that information search mediated the interaction effect of task conflict and task interdependence on team creativity. Results also indicated that affective commitment mediated the relationship between relationship conflict and team creativity. Further it was found that team competition moderated the effect of relationship conflict on affective commitment. Furthermore, study found that team competition moderated the effect of relationship conflict on team creativity. Finally this study found that affective commitment mediated the interaction effect of relationship conflict and team competition on team creativity. In addition to these findings, the results indicated that interaction of collaborative conflict management and task conflict did not affect team creativity and also it was found that collaborative conflict management and relationship conflict interacted to affect team creativity, i.e. collaborative conflict management was not moderated the relationship between task conflict and team creativity but moderated the relationship between relationship conflict and team creativity in such a way that when collaborative conflict management interacted with relationship conflict, teams exhibited grater team creativity. Researcher discussed the implications of these results; limitations and future direction of the research.Managerial implications of these studies suggest the nature of relationship between team conflict and team creativity seems to be fairly constant across contexts. Collaborative conflict management, task interdependence, team competition are important to team creativity. The effect of these variables on team creativity is direct. Thus, increasing perceptions of collaborative conflict management, task interdependence, team competition may help increase team creativity. Information search and affective commitment are mediators to transfer the interaction effect to team creativity. Further, as organization strive to benefit team conflict, it is important to focus on means of increasing team creativity. Thus, collaborative conflict management, task interdependence, team competition and having a good management of team conflict such as task and relationship may be means through which to enhance team creativity.