Emotional Conflict and Creative Synergy in Interdisciplinary Teams

Interdisciplinary teams have the potential for greater creativity in organizations. Interdisciplinary teams draw on a variety of functional expertise and divergent perspectives to facilitate the production of creative ideas. However, interdisciplinary teams do not necessarily produce creative work because members are reluctant to share their unique perspectives for fear of damaging their reputation, appearing incompetent, or simply to avoid conflict, in an effort to protecting intellectual turf. Thus, for interdisciplinary teams to produce creative work, members must actively voice their unique ideas with no fear of encroaching on interpersonal relationships, even if it means having to be aggressive and stubborn in defending dissenting perspectives to bring about change and improvement. Indeed, negative affective states provides a signal that all is not well and subsequently produces active persistence in pursuing creative responses to the existing dissatisfaction with the status quo. In this study, we collect data on team processes using conflict measures adapted from Jehn and Mannix (2001) from 15 interdisciplinary teams in a nanobiotechnology course. Specifically, we examine the effects both task conflict and emotional have on team creativity. Our findings indicate that emotional conflict is positively related to creativity in interdisciplinary teams whereas task conflict had no impact