Within The Team Interpersonal Conflict, Face Team Creativity

Organizations today are emerging from an era of change,and embarking upon a stage of uncertainty.Rapid market changes,technological advances,economic slowdowns, and eagemess for continuous improvement-challenge lies not only in their ability to survive,but also in capacity to innovate.Nevertheless,staff members, leaning upon individual knowledge and skill,can no longer meet the needs of diverse challenges.Self-directed teams,which consist of individuals coming from different areas of expertise,have contributed to the origins of innovation for every organization. This is especially for the knowledge-intensive ones,with a set of intellectual characteristics and working at creative resolutions to complicated problems and emergencies further constitute the backbone and key resources of organizations.At the same time,as an old saying goes 'too many cooks spoil the broth', teamwork will not always lead to an expected outcome as '1+1+1＞3'.'Two heads are better than one' is only a good wish,since conflict is ubiquitous among people and concequency following up is out of control.Sometimes truth becomes clearer through debates,and courtesy can be affable but not adulatory,whereas negative emotion can lead to conflict are problems that affect our lives.Only with some certain methods, can a group get twice the result with half the effort.In general,Chinese people take 'face'(Mianzi) seriously,and their need to protect that 'face' plays a crucial role in dealing with conflicts.The perceived threat to yourself and others will decide the strategy required to deal with the conflict.In addition,participants' assessments of interpersonal relationship can also influence their interpretation of threats to their status,which then affect sequential behaviors.In other words,socio-culture means a lot to a working team.To clarify the functioning of cultural factors,finding out how to deal with intragroup conflict,and discovering the regular pattern of group creation,not only contributes to the capacity of conflict management,but also the full use of conflict itself;not only conduces to the elimination of negative effects,but also the encouragement of 'creative destruction'.Based on previous theoretical and empirical studies,this paper presents an in-depth analysis of both positive and negative influences imposed by interpersonal conflict in knowledge-intensive task group.It is an exploratory research operating at aggregated group-level,and following the logic line of 'intragroup interpersonal conflict→perceived face threat(s)→conflict handling style/modes→group creativity'. 1) Draw lessons from 'Stimulus-Cognition-Response'(S-C-R) model in cognitive psychology,this study attempts to explore the function of face in the process of conflict management.By focusing on specific socio-cultural phenomena and taking a unique perspective of group atmosphere of face-saving and perceived face threats throughout conflicts,conclusions demonstrate that:face concern and relevant face needs shared among team members will act on their behavioral responses through intensity and face-threatening perception of given cases.In other words,perceived face threat will work as a partial mediator and conductor between an interpersonal conflict and following response.Individuals with different face-saving needs will decode a face threat in various ways,and then react distinctly as a result.Similarly, when conflicted with different counterparts,the individuals' subjective assessments of psychological distance between both sides will exert notable impact upon their interpretations of the environment.Ingroup identification among 'zijiren' influences team members' conflict-handling behaviors both through perceived solvability of conflict and induced face threats.The conductive paths between them differ in direction and strength as well.Therefore,mechanism of socio-cultural elements might be over-generalized.As hidden rules of personal interaction,their guiding effects on individual behavior are situation-dependent in nature.Furthermore,this study also looks at how mutual favor and intimacy between both parties will directly affect their face concern,and the direction of the effect is opposite to that imposing on perceived face threat.It is concluded that 'intimacy' actually contains several meanings.When defined as 'familiarity',due to understandings between each other,participants of an intragroup conflict can bring out correct interpretations to contextual information,which then lower the perceived threat.However,if mixed into liking or emotional dependence,it is more likely to trigger the motive of face-saving and impression management,which further intensifies pertinent needs and behavioral orientations.2) With reference to predecessors' viewpoints and author's preceding research, this study puts forward a definition for perceived face threat,and builds up a 4-dimention measuring model,in order to find out specific sources of face threats in Chinese background.It is indicated that face-threatening perceptions caused by intragroup interpersonal conflict events can be classified into at least four types: capability-based,relationship-based,morality-based and autonomy-based.There are significant pairwise correlations between each two of them,among which the most evident one is present between threat perceptions on interpersonal relationship and individual morality(r=0.41).Face threats recognized by individuals should be ascribed to the combining effects of type(refer to content and property of conflict events),intensity(refer to severity and importance of conflict events) and solvability of conflicts.Different circumstances usually cause different perceptions with different characters,and estimates relating to intensity and solvability of conflicts will exert impacts in different ways as well.For example,experienced intensity of an interest conflict can only cast influence on individual moral- and autonomy-based face-threatening perceptions,and standardized coefficient of the former(β=0.290, p＜0.01) is significantly higher than that of the latter(β=0.146,p＜0.05).3) Based on various classical measuring tools of conflict handling modes,this study summarize and integrates them into a new one,which is translated and revised to apply to Chinese context.It proves that the Five-Factor model raised by Blake and Mouton(1964) achieves adequate robustness.According to this model,we can easily uncover specific conflict-handling patterns and styles formed by every working group. Data analyses show that,under any circumstances,conflict management is no way a 'simple selection',but rather a 'multiple combination of various alternatives'.After repeated practices,a set of behavioral modes will solidify into a more stable style,and then turn into 'conditional response' to some extent.For Chinese,conflict-handling style also can be viewed as a combination of perceived face threats and consequential behavioral reactions.For example,enhancing threat perception on capacity will lead to competition,threat perception on relationship will develop cooperation,and threat perception on morality will result in obedience,etc.That means,perceived face threat functions variously in different kinds of intragroup conflicts.At the same time,results of data analysis manifest that,no matter what kind of conflict it is,the standardized coefficient for tradeoff behavior is always higher than that for cooperation.It seems to confirm the supreme pursuit of 'fair' in Chinese society.4) In line with the fundamental idea of match theory,this study explores the match effect between specific circumstances of intragroup interpersonal conflicts and sets of handling modes,in order to disclose the impacts casted by conflicts and following processes upon the creative performance of a working group.The study concludes that the effects of constructive or destructive conflicts are not due to the content of the events,but rather in the selection of peculiar strategies,which in turn dominates the evolvement and outcome of the events.When applying different tactics to deal with different types of conflicts,can working group maintain creativity in a relative high level? Comparisons of three samples demonstrates that there is a significant interaction between type and level properties of a conflict event.Different perception of intensity and corresponding expectation of solvability,concerning different types of conflict,will impose various effects on individual perceptions of face threat.Additionally,the content of a conflict event also determines the effectiveness of different behaviors,and the two matches each other.As a result, knowledge-intensive groups will exhibit distinct performance on creative jobs.It is confirmed that cooperative handling mode is superior to other modes.However,on the other hand,the constructive function of competitive behaviors should not be ignored as well,especially in cognitive and value conflicts.There is no simple and clear division between right and wrong.The key point is how to make appropriate choice under specific circumstances,because even compromise,retreat,avoidance or obedience can be advantageous sometimes.In summary,this study is mainly an exploration.The conclusions obtained will help contribute towards a set of theories,such as theory of interpersonal conflict and conflict management,face and face concern,ingroup identification,and group creativity,which in turn give rise to valuable advice for the management of knowledge-intensive groups.