A Social Network View of Team Conflict-Creativity Relationships: Explicating the Who, When, and How

Scholars have long argued that within-team conflict can meaningfully affect team creativity, with relationship conflict generally seen as having a negative influence and task conflict a more complicated influence. Yet, prior investigations are limited in that conflict is predominantly conceptualized as members’ shared perceptions of the overall conflict in a team, thereby assuming that all members experience similar levels of conflict and/or all conflict in the team exerts equal influence. Breaking from this approach, we employ a social network perspective to conceptualize conflict as a dyadic phenomenon and, moreover, argue that critical members’ conflict with others explains additional variance in team creativity beyond overall team conflict. Drawing from the dual-pathway to creativity theory and motivated information processing theory, we posit that a critical member’s task conflict enhances team creativity by increasing team reflexivity and, further, that this positive indirect effect is accentuated by a team’s shared goals. Separately, we posit that a critical member’s relationship conflict hinders team creativity via reduced team cohesion, though this negative indirect effect is mitigated by the critical member’s emotional intelligence. A field study of 314 employees in 70 new product development teams lends support for most of the hypotheses.