Impact of Task Conflict on Individual Performance: Moderating Role of Team Creativity

Abstract

Task conflict may enhance team performance in certain circumstances, according to prior research, but these particular circumstances are not well understood. We contend that one particular situation where task conflict will enhance team performance is a climate of psychological safety, based on previous theory and research on conflict in teams. The current study discovered that psychological safety climate moderates the relationship between task conflict and performance using data from 117 project teams. Under circumstances of high psychological safety, task conflict and team performance were specifically positively correlated. The findings are consistent with the hypothesis that psychological safety supports task conflict's positive effects on team performance.We present a model that integrates the literatures on task conflict, team creativity, and project team development. In this model, the relationship between task conflict and team creativity is dependent on the level of conflict and the stage of a project team's life cycle at which it occurs. We discovered that task conflict had a curvilinear relationship with team creativity in a study of 71 information technology project teams in the greater China region. Creativity peaked at moderate levels of task conflict. Furthermore, we discovered that the team phase moderated this relationship, with the curvilinear effect being strongest at an early stage. Task conflict, however, was discovered to be unrelated to team creativity at later stages of the team life cycle.