Ups and downs on the roller coaster of task conflict: the role of group cognitive complexity, collective emotional intelligence and team creativity

Abstract

This study explores the association between task conflict and team creativity and the role of group cognitive complexity (GCC) as a potential explanatory mechanism in a sample of 159 students organized in 49 groups. Moreover, we analyzed the moderating effect of collective emotional intelligence (CEI)in the relationship between task conflict and GCC.As hypothesized, we found that task conflict has a nonlinear relationship with GCC, but contrary to our expectations, it follows a U-shaped association, not an inversed U-shape. In addition,the moderating role of CEI was significant only at low levels. Contrary to our expectation, the mediating role of GCC did not receive empirical support. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

How Task Conflict Can Support Creative Problem Solving in Teams by Stimulating Knowledge Sharing, Critical and Creative Thinking and Meta-Cognition

“…Team creativity concerns the production of novel and useful ideas to produce products, processes and procedures by a team of people working together [39]. Team work is beneficial to creativity as groups are able to produce novel, creative outputs due to quality interactions and diverse cognitive inputs of the team members [40]. The working definition of creative thinking for this study is defined as:…”

“…Task conflict has been associated with enhanced creativity in inter-organisational teams [77,78]. Task related disagreements among team members are a key driver for rich collective knowledge structures emerging from knowledge exchange, which has a positive influence on team creativity [40]. Task conflict is considered to aid creative problem solving and group decision making because it defers decision making and triggers critical thinking and constructive criticism to evaluate solutions [17,79,80].…”

“…The discussions of the team members during episodes of conflict can determine if conflict has a positive influence on teams. Gheorghe et al [40] argue that the ability of teams to process information rests on the cognitive processes and individual representations, as well as on the quality of interactions that take place among group members. It can take team members several turns of speech to negotiate and resolve task conflict [25].…”

“…We propose that limited levels of task conflict can have a beneficial impact on creative problem solving by stimulating certain cognitive processes to encourage information exchange and negotiation, to build constructed knowledge within the team. Producing a creative output involves finding connections among seemingly unrelated concepts, requiring a complex knowledge structure facilitating groups to shift between perspectives [40]. In turn this will stimulate iterative episodes of idea exploration and evaluation to arrive at considered solutions.…”

The Influence of Emotional Intelligence on Creativity, The Mediating Role of Employee Attitudes: Analysis of Mellat Holding in Kurdistan

“…This is regrettable for a number of reasons ). In the pantheon of character strengths and virtues, both EI and creativity are frequently mentioned (Gheorghe, et al, 2020). Yet, little research has been done to see why and how EI can help people be more creative.…”