An Empirical Research Of Relationship Between Team Conflict And Team Creativity

With increasing of competitive market and customer demanding for products and services, enterprises must constantly innovate so as to be invincible. Creativity, as the source of innovation is particularly noteworthy. Aware of modern enterprises in the increasingly fine division of labor, personal knowledge and energy limited, team has become increasingly frequent. However, even if the team is organized by Individual with high creativity, the team itself may not be highly creative. Conflict takes an important role in the process of individual creativity changing into team creativity. This study aims to reveal the relationship between team conflict and team creativity.After reviewed some related literature, we found a number of theoretical issues needed further investigation: (1) Whether team conflict is beneficial to team creativity? (2) Whether the relationship between team conflict and team creativity will be affected by other factors? To reveal the above problems, this study researches the relationship between team conflict and team creativity, task structure is used as a moderator.This study used 141 sample teams and SPSS statistical tools to ensure this assumption. It could be concluded as the following:(1) It can not simply say whether team conflict is beneficial to team creativity. Three different kinds of team conflict—task conflict, relationship conflict, process conflict have different effects on team creativity. Task conflict has a positively predictive influence on team creativity; Relationship conflict has a negatively predictive influence on team creativity; The relationship between process conflict and team creativity is not significant.(2) Process conflict and relationship conflict have significant correlation. The higher is process conflict, the higher is relationship conflict. The relationship of task conflict and relationship conflict is not significant.(3) Task complexity and task interdependence can be used as a moderator between the relationship of team conflict and team creativity. If task complexity is higher or task interdependence is lower, task conflict would be more obvious to team creativity. Task complexity and task interdependence can not be used as a moderator between the relationship of relationship conflict and team creativity.