Research On The Influence Of Team Task Conflict On Team Decision-Making Performance

Top management Teams (TMT) undertake the mission of making and implementing the strategic decisions, and are the core communities deciding the future development of enterprises. According to the "Upper Echelons Theory", the individual characteristic, team structure and decision-making process would all influence the final decisions directly. However, compared to the team biographical characteristics, the TMT decision-making process was controlled and transferred more easily. So the TMT decision-making process becomes more and more attractive. The strategic decision-making process is a highly complex and dynamic process, and non routine and uncertainty make the frictions and conflicts during the decision-making process prominent. Therefore, how to understand the connection between conflicts and decision-making performance correctly and how to use conflicts to improve the decision-making performance are the problems faced by the TMT.On the basis of generalizing and analyzing the team conflicts theory, decision-making theory and information processing theory, against to the disadvantages in current study, this thesis chose the TMT as case study and task conflict as research start, and structured the model of the influence mechanism of "team task conflict - unique information processing - team decision-making performance" available for face-to-face decision-making process. This research exposed the impact of team task conflict to decision-making performance through empirical method and experimental method, including the main research contents as follows:(1) Research the two-way influence mechanism of task conflict to decision-making performance during face-to-face decision-making processOwing to face-to-face communication is the most commonly way for decision making, this research aimed at the decision making on site, chose the task conflict as the research starting point, and structured the model of "team task conflicts - unique information processing - team relationship conflict - team decision-making performance". On the basis of the previous studies only on positive effect or negative effect of the task conflicts, this model put the two effects of task conflicts to decision-making performance in the research category.This research used experimental research to explore deeply the influence mechanism of task conflicts to decision-making performance during the face-to-face decision-making process. And the researching results indicated, during the face-to-face decision-making process, task conflicts and unique information processing, and unique information processing and decision-making performance both had the remarkable relationship, which means that task conflicts had the potential to increase the decision-making performance. However, task conflicts would evoke relationship conflicts, and relationship conflicts would have negative effects on the decision-making performance. The two effects made the relationship between task conflicts and decision-making performance ambiguous, the relationship between the two may be remarkable positive, or remarkable negative, or no remarkable connection.(2) Seek the situation factors beneficial for "task conflicts - decision-making performance" in Chinese TMTTo make task conflicts and decision-making performance have positive relationship, introducing the suitable situation factors is the key. The previous researches about situation factors about conflicts mostly chose the foreign TMT as case studies. However, in view of different countries having different customs, the situation factors which could stimulate the information processing effectively and aim at the conflicts transformation were different. Therefore, this research performed empirical research with Chinese TMT specially. In the light of the focuses of this research were emotional relationship and cognitive ability, so 5 alternative situation variables of trust, perceived team climate, team emotional intelligence, epistemic motivation and perceived self-efficacy were been chosen.Questionnaire survey was carried out among 392 executives of 87 teams in different industries. Through the empirical analysis, the task conflicts and decision performance was remarkable positive, and trust and epistemic motivation had remarkable positive moderating effects on the postitive relationship between task conflicts and decision-making performance, and the other variables had only some positive effect or no effects on the positive relationship between task conflicts and decision-making performance.(3) Research on the relationship of task conflicts and decision-making performance under situation factorsOn the basis of introducing the suitable situation factors for Chinese TMTs, this research furthermore analyzed the concrete regulating process of trust and epistemic motivation to "task conflicts - decision-making performance". The concrete method was separately testing the moderating effects of trust and epistemic motivation on task conflicts and unique information processing, and task conflicts and relationship conflicts. The results suggested that trust and epistemic motivation had positive moderating effects on the positive relationship of "task conflicts - unique information processing", and had negative moderating effects on the positive relationship of "task conflicts - relationship conflicts".Based on these, this research tested the relationship between task conflict and decision-making performance under the high trust condition and high epistemic motivation condition furthermore. The findings suggested under the high trust condition and high epistemic motivation condition, task conflicts and decision-making performance had a remarkable positive relationship. This meant if there was appropriate climate build in the teams, task conflict and decision-making performance would have the beneficial relationship needed by the executives.