Conflicts and creative idea endorsement

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to investigate relationship conflicts and creative idea endorsement to develop the understanding of managerial reactions towards ideas of those who develop relationship conflicts with managers/supervisors at work. Taking a contingency perspective, the authors also investigated role subordinates’ political skills and implementation instrumentality play in determining supervisors’ endorsement of subordinates’ creative ideas. Design/methodology/approach The authors used two sources of data collected from 243 subordinates and their respective 41 supervisors of a multinational software company operating in an emerging economy (Pakistan) and analyzed the hypothesized model with Mplus using random coefficient modeling. Findings With this research, the authors contributed to management literature by investigating how the effects of relationship conflicts on creative idea endorsement depend on subordinates’ political skills and implementation instrumentality. They postulate a negative relationship between relationship conflict and creative ideas endorsement and predict that this negative relationship is augmented by subordinates’ implementation instrumentality but attenuated by subordinates’ political skills. They also give directions to decision makers in organizations that they must inform the managers/supervisors about negative effects of their relationship conflict with their subordinates and train supervisors and subordinates about reducing their relationship conflicts with each other for mutual benefits. Originality/value Organizations should take a relationship perspective when creating an environment for creativity: an environment based on mutual trust and respect so that exchange relationships can foster. With this research, the authors extended the list of potential detriment associated with relationship conflicts, that is the endorsement of creative ideas by supervisors. The authors also extended creativity literature by investigating social relationships for selection-focused creativity (idea endorsement) instead of variance-focused creativity (idea generation).

Conflict side of creativity: Role of supervisory support and team affective tone in facilitating creative idea validation

“…In our sample, all variables were operated at a single level of analyses; thus, we used the random coefficients modeling technique at the individual level with Mplus 7.0 for random coefficients. Researchers have already used this technique for data with similar characteristics ( 15 , 77 ). For model fit indicators, the output produced by Mplus cannot be used in a regular way; therefore we also have to perform the Satorra-Bentler difference test using the log-likelihood method for chi-square difference testing ( 101 ).…”

“…Relationship conflicts refer to the tension stemming from interpersonal incompatibilities in personalities and emotions ( 13 ) are part of organizational life ( 14 ). These conflicts, are detrimental to creative process ( 3 , 6 , 10 , 15 , 16 ). Thereby, researchers have highlighted the importance of studying relationship conflicts so as to ensure that employees work properly ( 17 ) and organizations can capitalize on the creative potential of their employees ( 3 , 18 , 19 ).…”

“…First, employee creativity research has predominantly focused on the idea generation part of creativity, ignoring the challenges creative individuals face in promoting creative ideas with more criticism and offense by coworkers than support ( 1 , 28 , 29 ). Additionally, communication between coworkers plays a significant role in the creative process ( 15 , 19 , 30 ). Less is known about the role and impact of communication hazards for creative idea validation.…”

Leader-member exchange and creative idea validation: The role of helping and bullying

“…Built on social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), LMX theory asserts the inimitable, distinct dyadic relationships between subordinates and their supervisors (Dienesch & Liden, 1986). These dyadic relationships can make or break a person's career (Adeel et al, 2019). Such that, position among peers (Erdogan et al, 2015), creative potential (Martin et al, 2016;Qu et al, 2015), and influence the extent to which an individual will get involved in creative endeavours (Zhang et al, 2018;Muñoz-Doyague & Nieto, 2012).…”

The relation between project team conflict and user resistance in software projects

“…Team conflict has been well-researched in information systems research. For example, conflict has been studied in the context of software development process and software projects [ 26 , 27 , 29 , 31 – 33 ], employee well-being [ 23 , 25 ], creativity and innovation [ 28 , 34 ], organizational and team performance [ 30 , 35 ]. Literature on resistance and team conflict has been however developed separately with few studies attempting to merge knowledge from both streams of research [ 36 ].…”