Study On Relationship Between R&D Team Heterogeneity And Team Performance

Team is composed by members with complementary knowledge, skills and abilities. Team members have the same goal and are responsible for the team’s results together. Their complementation leads to not only social attribute differences, like gender and age, but also education background, serving time, expertise and value differences, which constitute team heterogeneity. Members with different characteristics and backgrounds inevitably have contradictions and conflicts in the process of cooperation, so the mechanism of effect of team heterogeneity and conflict on team performance has become an important subject.On the basis of literature, this paper summarizes progress and shortfalls of former research on relationship between team heterogeneity and team performance, chooses R&D team as research sample, establishes a theoretical model of R&D team heterogeneity, conflict and team performance, and proposes research hypothesis.In the empirical research phase, first of all using SPSS19.0to take a small sample pre-test and amend the questionnaire, then using Amos17.0to conduct confirmatory factor analysis of108enterprise R&D team, this paper explores how R&D team heterogeneity and conflict exert effects on team performance. The results shows as follows:first, information heterogeneity has a directly positive impact on team performance, while the social attribute heterogeneity and values heterogeneity have negative impacts on team performance; second, emotional conflict has a mediator effect on the relationship between social attributes heterogeneity and team performance, task conflict has a mediator effect on the relationship between information heterogeneity and team performance, while task conflict and emotional conflict do not play mediating roles between values heterogeneity and team performance; third, value heterogeneity directly has negative effect on team performance.In the end, combined with conclusions of empirical research and characteristics of the R&D teams, this paper draws corresponding counrtmeasures and suggestions on how to improve team performance from the point of view of heterogeneity.