Mechanism Of Team Conflict On Team Innovation

In the field of management and organization, team conflict refers to that during the interactive process, team members perceive the incompatibility or difference with each other and as a result, disagreement and depression may occur among team members.Theories about team conflict can be divided into information processing theory and interactive theory. Form the perspective of information processing theory, team members may be interfered by team conflict and could not focus on current tasks. Team conflict may occupy task-related resources and increase cognitive load and do harm to effective cognitive process. Nevertheless, the interactive theory argues that the harmony, quiet and tranquil environment may make organization be slow to the reform and that is not beneficial to reform innovation. Hence, these scholars advocate that the minimum level of team conflict must be present so as to maintain the vitality, creativity and innovation in the team.Team conflict may exert different influence on team performance in terms of divergent team types. In product teams, as team tasks are routine, teams may prefer simple solutions and when team members have disagreements on task and process at this time, team performance may be badly affected; in innovation teams, as team tasks are nonroutine, teams need to constantly find new ideas and solutions, team conflict may be beneficial to team performance.In contrast to former studies, this study explored the relationship between team conflict and team innovation behavior based on social information theory to understand the mechanism of team conflict to team performance, this paper add team innovation into team performance to rich the knowledge of team innovative performance. Meanwhile, through social information processing theory, this paper introduced team learning as mediate variable, and team climate of innovation as the moderate variable, this paper discussed the relationship among them.Based on substantial former researches, this paper employed maturate questionnaires and tested hypotheses in the school and companies.data were collected through questionnaires and analyzed with the assistance of SPSS 16.0. Results show that:(1) The result of samples in the school and companies, results showed that the relationship between task conflict and team innovation was also an inverted “U” shaped curve; team task conflict and team relationship conflict were positive related; team learning played a fully intermediary role in the nonlinear relationship; team climate of innovation positively regulated the relationship between task conflict and team innovation.(2) The result of samples in the company showed that team relationship conflict was negative related to team innovation and team learning played a fully intermediary role in the linear relationship. Team climate of innovation did not regulated the relationship between relationship conflict and team innovation. Hypothesis were not supported in the school.In the end of this study, the author discussed the result and provided some explanations with the assistance of some relevant theories We also discussed the limitation this paper had and put forward several directions for future study.