Multiple goal conflicts and exploratory innovation: Does alignment between team and organization help or hurt?

Abstract

This study examines the varying impacts of multiple goal conflicts on employees’ exploratory innovative behaviors. Although innovation is vital for an organization's survival and competitive advantage, the simultaneous pursuit of other goals may create goal conflicts for employees: increasing pressure on their scarce resources, including time and cognitive capacity. While much of the existing research discusses goal conflicts in general or emphasizes their negative performance consequences, we extend this literature by theorizing about two distinct ways individuals may interpret goal conflicts—either as a trade-off (e.g., innovation vs. revenue) or as complementary (e.g., innovation vs. safety)—and how these interpretations affect exploratory innovation. Moreover, we theorize that team–organization alignment moderates these effects. Our findings, based on multilevel, multisource, time-lagged data from a large energy company, indicate that conflicts involving innovation goals do not uniformly impact employee exploratory behavior. Increasing levels of conflict between innovation and safety goals are associated with employees conducting more innovation activities, but the expected negative effect of innovation-revenue conflicts is insignificant. Moreover, in a context of high alignment the innovation-safety conflict triggers employees to innovate more; in contrast, for the innovation-revenue conflict it is the opposite. Our study offers important implications for the literature on multiple goal conflict and highlights the critical roles of employees and their alignment with senior leadership.