A Study On The Relationship Between Team Conflict And Team Innovation

Team conflict is an important concept in the field of organizational behavior research,it refers to the team members in the process of interaction,due to perceived incompatible or inconsistent with each other,resulting in disputes,friction,depression and so on.In the past few decades,a large number of literature on the team conflict conducted a theoretical and empirical research.At the same time,as the importance of innovation to the survival and development of the organization is paid more and more attention,the relationship between team conflict and team innovation has been paid more and more attention by scholars.From the early to the direct relationship between them to explore the introduction of regulatory variables,and then to explore the mechanism between them,the academic community has accumulated a large number of related literature.Through the review of relevant literature,we can find that there are still some problems in the research of the relationship between team conflict and team innovation.For example,scholars have different views on how team conflict affects team innovation.There are two main points:"conflict Harmful theory "and"theory of conflict type".Some scholars argue that team conflict can undermine the normal order of the organization and have a detrimental effect on team performance and thus suggest that "conflict is harmful"(Argyris,1962;Blake and Mouton,1984;Pondy,1967).Jehn(1995),after drawing on the perspectives of previous scholars,divides team conflict into two dimensions:task conflict and conflict of relationships.Later,Chinese and Western scholars have studied these two types of conflict and the innovative performance of employees,but have not reached a consistent conclusion.For example,the meta-analysis of DeDreu and Weingart(2003)shows that task conflict and conflict of relations are not good for employees.Innovation behavior,Hulsheger and Anderson(2009),and De Wit,Green and Jehn(2012)argue that,in some contexts,the conflict of tasks favors the conflict of tasks and the conflicting relationship between job conflicts and employee innovation.Employee 's innovative behavior.The inconsistency of the above research results may be caused by the context and method of their research design,so the scholars began to explore the mechanism of regulating variables.However,in the previous scholars on the adjustment of variables in the exploration,due to the availability of resources and research design constraints tend to make the results of the lack of universality.This can lead to different effects of team conflict on team innovation.Based on the previous research,this paper explores the influence of two dimensions of team conflict on team innovation,and tests the potential adjustment variables which affect the relationship between the two.The results of the meta-analysis show that the effect of task conflict and team innovation r=0.161,p<0.05,and there is a significant positive correlation between task conflict and team innovation.The relationship between conflict and team innovation r=-0.309,p<0.001,and there is a very significant negative correlation between relationship conflict and team innovation.In this paper,according to the adjustment variable classification method which affects the relationship between team conflict and team innovation proposed by De Wit(2012),the adjustment variables are classified according to the characteristics of the situation and the characteristics of the research method.The results of meta-analysis show that the recovery rate of East-West culture,task type,subject type and research method characteristics in situational characteristics play a certain role in the relationship between team conflict and team innovation.The results of the research will help us to understand the status quo of team conflict in the field of team innovation research,and provide reference for the research on the related mechanism of the two mechanisms,the potential adjustment variables and the design of empirical research.