Research On Modeling Of The Generation Of Knowledge-Based Team Conflicts

In the knowledge economics era, knowledge has become the core competitiveness of the organizations. To ensure their core competitiveness, many organizations form knowledge teams with knowledge workers and expect effective knowledge sharing within the team. However, conflict may occur among team members with different knowledge and affect knowledge sharing and team creativity.The conflicts generated within knowledge-based team during the activities of knowledge exchange named knowledge-based team conflicts and are divided into two types, i.e., relationship conflict and task conflict. Based on the concept and types of knowledge-based team conflicts, this article firstly developed the models of the generation of relationship conflict and task conflict respectively and then analyzed the effect of relationship conflicts and task conflicts on team cohesiveness respectively and the micro-mechanism of the effects.(1) Research on the modeling of the generation of relationship conflict. The personality of team members and the degree of satisfaction for knowledge exchange could influence the generation of relationship conflict. The big five model and knowledge stocks were used to describe team member’s personality and knowledge attribute. And the relationship conflicts generation model is proposed to describe the process of knowledge exchange, relationship conflict generation and the effects of relationship conflict. Based on the developed model, several computational simulations with three kinds of knowledge-based teams have been conducted to aim revealing the effects of relationship conflict on team cohesiveness and the micro-mechanism of generation of relationship conflict. Results show that relationship conflicts within team are negative for team cohesiveness and this result is identical with the empirical results which demonstrate the correctness of the model. Also the results show team with less knowledge and mechanism for selecting knowledge provider with closer relationship instead of with more knowledge result in more relationship conflicts. Furthermore, similar personality and knowledge and frequent knowledge exchanges are the main reasons for the generation of relationship conflicts.(2) Research on the modeling of the generation of task conflict. Task conflict generate because of different opinions about team task. Within a knowledge-based team, knowledge diversity lead to the different opinions. The knowledge diversity was described with knowledge category, knowledge stock and knowledge centrality. The article developed a task conflict generation model to describe the generation and process of the effect of task conflicts on team. Based on the developed model, several computational simulations have been conduct to explore the effects of task conflict and the micro-mechanism of the effects. Results show that less task conflicts have positive effect on team cohesiveness and serious task conflicts have negative effect on team cohesiveness. Through the analysis of the micro-mechanism of the effects, we find that too many and too little team members with high knowledge centrality are both bad for the increase of the team cohesiveness.The research results of this article contribute to direct organizations to form high efficiency knowledge-based team and also do some contribution to the research of knowledge-based team conflicts.