Gender Faultline And Group Innovative Performance: The Mediating Effect Of Group Conflict

In the Knowledge-base Economy era, more and more enterprises have adopted the way of working in groups. In modern businesses, groups are frequently composed of members with different departments and diverse backgrounds, group diversity not only has positive impact on group performances, but also may be cause group conflicts and have negative impact on group performances. How to build groups and make the most of their positive impact has been an important issue, which has paid attention by managers and psychologists. Moreover, if enterprises want to promote the sustainable development of organizations, they must innovate continually, and the level of innovation rests with group innovative performance. Therefore, how to reduce group conflict and improve group innovative performance within diverse groups has been an important task.This dissertation uses faultline theory to explore the effects of group gender diversity on group innovative performance, as well as, research the mediating mechanisms of group conflict through which gender faultline influences group innovative performance. In the study, group conflict is divided into relationship conflict, task conflict and process conflict, and we explore the mediating effects of three group conflicts. This paper simply introduces the meaning of group diversity, faultline, group conflict and group innovative performance, then discusses the relationship among faultline, group conflict and group innovative performance. Through the experiment of 80 four-person groups, this study used SPSS statistical software to analyze the data, and used the statistical methods such as t-test, correlation analysis, variance analysis and regression analysis to verify the proposed hypotheses of the study.The conclusions of this dissertation are as follows:(1) The relationship between gender faultline and group innovative performance. The activation of gender faultline negatively affects group innovative performance, and the no activation of gender faultline doesn't affect group innovative performance. Namely, gender faultline that is activated has negative effects on group innovative ability and group innovative behavior, and gender faultline that is not activated has no effects on group innovative ability and group innovative behavior.(2) The relationship between gender faultline and group conflict. Gender faultline that is activated result in group conflict, namely, relationship conflict, task conflict and process conflict have significant increase. Moreover, gender faultline that is not activated has no significant influence on the level of relationship conflict, task conflict and process conflict.(3) The relationship between gender faultline and group innovative performance is partially mediated by the level of group conflict. If the level of activated gender faultline is higher, relationship conflict, task conflict and process conflict would be more, accordingly, group innovative performance would be lower. However, if the level of activated gender faultline is lower, relationship conflict, task conflict and process conflict would be less, accordingly, group innovative performance would be higher.In the end, this article explained shortcomings of the study and put forward some proposals to improve on the researches in the future. Then, on the basis of conclusions which this study has got, in accordance with the actual situations of the corporations which are in China, some suggests are brought forward on how to work over faultline has effects on group conflict and group innovative performance.