Group Diversity And Group Creativity: The Mediating Role Of Intragroup Conflict And Group Social Capital

Groups are becoming more diverse with fiercer global competition, network and communication technology development, and increasing flow of professionel. How to build and manage diverse groups has been an importanat issue for international theory and business circles. Meanwhile, long-term competitive advantage is built on sustainable innovation which depends on the whole group's creativity. Therefore, group creativity becomes the new focus of enterprises. And how to make diverse groups produce higher creativity becomes a new problem.Diversity was often portrayed as a "double-edged sword" with unconsistent results concerning its effects on group process and creativity. Based on above-mentioned backgroud, this study creatively divided group diversity into low job-related surface-level diversity, high job-related surface-level diversity and deep-level diversity, and then analysed their effects on group creativity separately. This study also seeked to research the mediating process and context effects between group diversity and group creativity through the introduction of two mediator-intragroup conflict and group social capital, and two moderator- task characteristic and leadership style.This study analysed enterprises groups of Yangzi River Delta, Pearl River Delta and other cities from individual and group level separately with 200 individual samples and 79 group samples, using statistic tools such as SPSS and AMOS. The results were as follows: low job-related surface-level diversity and deep-level diversity negatively influenced group creativity, while high job-related surface-level diversity had positive effect on it. Group diversity influenced group process, and the "group diversityâ†'intragroup conflictâ†'intragroup social capitalâ†'group creativity" path existed significantly both in individual and group samples. Besides, task interdependence had certain moderating effect on the relationship between group diversity and group creativity. The results enriched the multidimension research of group diversity, covered domestic shortage in the research field of creativity, especially group creativity. There also was a helpful try to introduce the group social capital variable. Implications for HRM practice and future research were discussed.