Unpacking the Relationships between Conflicts and Innovation in Project Teams

Conflicts within a team are inevitable and understanding the effects of conflicts is important for team decision-making. Previous literature has reported inconsistent relationships between conflicts and team performance. Based on a survey covering 436 participants from 126 project teams, this paper explored the relationship between cognitive and affective conflicts and compared the effects of various conflicts on team innovation. The empirical results indicated that cognitive conflict had direct and positive effect on team innovation, while it had much more negative effect on team innovation through the mediating role of affective conflict. Meanwhile, cooperative conflict management styles (including integrating, obliging and compromising) can negatively moderate the relationship between cognitive and affective conflicts, and dominating style has a positive moderating role.