When and How Does Team Task Conflict Spark Team Innovation? A Contingency Perspective

Whether team task conflict is beneficial or harmful to team innovation has long been controversial, and empirical studies on the team task conflict–team innovation relationship were inconsistent. Drawing on the contingency model of team innovation, the current study examined how team task conflict interacts with two types of team supportive climates, namely team support for innovation (TSFI) and team psychological safety (TPS), in predicting team innovation via team information elaboration. We tested our hypotheses using multi-source and lagged data collected from 361 employees working in 98 research and development teams. As expected, team information elaboration mediated the interaction effects between team task conflict and team supportive climates on team innovation. In particular, team task conflict had a positive indirect effect on team innovation via team information elaboration when TSFI or TPS was high. However, such indirect effect was negative when TSFI was low and was not significant when TPS was low. Residualized relative weight analysis comparing the moderation effects further suggests that TFSI and TPS are equally important team climates in activating the beneficial effect of team task conflict. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.