The Influence of Conflict on Creativity-Relevant Intragroup Processes Over Time

Abstract

In this extended abstract, we review the preliminary findings from a study examining the relationship between conflict and creativity-relevant intragroup processes over time. More specifically, we examine whether task and relationship conflict have lingering effects on team creative processes and information sharing. We examine these relationships with two-wave longitudinal data collected from 141 individuals across 32 project teams in an academic setting. Our preliminary analysis suggests that, beyond the effect of information sharing at time 1, task conflict and trust interact to influence subsequent information sharing at time 2. The results for relationship conflict suggest that it is trust that has lingering effects on both of these creativity-relevant processes, not relationship conflict. Additional analysis is underway to further explore how conflict and creativity-relevant processes unfold over time.