地位冲突的“双面”特性与团队创新

Double Sides of Status Conflict and Team Innovation

本研究基于动机性信息加工理论,构建了地位冲突、任务冲突和关系冲突在不同地位赋予标准下与团队创新绩效的关系模型。通过对来自36家高科技企业105个团队的上下级配对样本进行统计分析发现,中国情境中的地位冲突、任务冲突和关系冲突并不像Be nde r sk y等预测的那样并行影响团队产出,而是通过地位冲突的先行作用以及任务冲突与关系冲突的中介作用序列影响团队创新绩效。除此之外,地位冲突对团队创新绩效的影响也不是固定的,而是发挥着积极和消极的"双面性"作用,地位冲突如果诱发任务冲突可对团队创新绩效产生积极影响,而如果诱发关系冲突则会对团队创新绩效产生消极影响。研究还发现,恰当选择地位赋予标准可以有效抑制地位冲突的消极作用从而增强其积极作用,组织借助地位冲突管理可以提高团队创新水平。

Modern organizations have been relying on team innovation for competitive advantage. It is therefore becoming an unavoidable problem for managers to think about how to trigger creative output. From the perspective of status striving, status conflict will push individuals to contend with other by unconventional means, which may arouse employees' innovative behavior to a great extent. Although so many studies have examined the relationship between team conflict and team innovation, most of them just focused on three kinds of team conflicts, i.e., relationship, task and process conflicts, very few studies have explored how the fourth kind of conflict, i.e. status conflict affect team innovation. Status conflict may trigger unconventional ways and arouse creative deviant competition or counterproductive deviant competition. Deviant competition is related to two kinds of motivations in team: cognitive motivation and selfish social motivation, which may form double effect from the perspective of the motivated information processing in groups model. On the one hand, cognitive motivation is very likely to drive task conflict and has positive effect on team innovation;on the other hand, the illegality driven by egoistic social motivation is likely to cause interpersonal conflicts, which destroy the interactive mechanism needed for team information processing and have a negative impact on team innovation. Based on the motivated information processing in groups model, this study constructed and tested a model of the relationship among status conflict, task conflict, and relationship conflict and team innovation performance under the different status conferral criteria. A statistical analysis from dyadic sample of 105 teams in 36 hightech enterprises shows that, in China, status conflicts, task conflicts and relationship conflicts do not affect team outcomes in parallel necessarily as Bendersky & Hays (2012) predicted. They also affect team innovation performance sequentially through the proactive role of status conflict and the intermediary role of task conflict and relationship conflict. In addition, the impact of status conflict on team innovation performance is not fixed;it has positive and negative "double sides". In particular, status conflict can exert a positive influence on team innovation performance by inducing task conflict, and have a negative impact on team innovation performance by inducing relationship conflict. Finally, the results of the study also find that the appropriate choice of status conferral criteria can help to restrain the negative effect of status conflict and promote its positive role, so organizations can improve their team innovation performance by appropriate status conflict management.