신뢰와 갈등, 그리고 지식공유가 개인창의성에 미치는 영향

In these days, the success or failure of a firm depends on the value creation based on the creativity. The management has been focused on how to build and enhance the innovation and creative competence for the firm’s success. Also, scholars have been suggested creativity and innovation as crucial factors in achieving a sustainable competitive advantage. How to encourage creative behavior in workplaces is, therefore, a critical issue for the leader. Understanding the relationship between knowledge sharing and creativity is a key factor to the leader for the strategic knowledge creation and creativity management. On the other hand, the knowledge conversion basically based on the social interaction between various persons in organizations. Consequently, creativity is very much dependent on knowledge sharing which based on social interactions. However, surprisingly, there has been few empirical research on the relationship between knowledge sharing and creativity, even though the discussions which knowledge sharing would be positively related to creativity are often noted in the literature. Additionally, in accordance with the variation which teams were gradually settled in a major form of firms, this change has caused the increase of issues on trust and conflict in the team. Previous research has emphasized the impact of trust and conflict in the knowledge sharing and creativity. Because trust and conflict influence employees’ creative behavior and social interaction such as knowledge sharing by affecting cognitive and motivational processes of team members. In this regard, we consider trust and conflict are appropriate variables to reveal the causality between knowledge and creativity in detail. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between knowledge sharing and individual creativity which have been discussed theoretically to date and to examine the mediating role of knowledge sharing in the relationships between trust, conflict, and individual creativity. Specifically, this study focused on the mediating role of knowledge sharing and the impact of subdivisions of trust and conflict that can be classified as cognitive and affective trust, task and relationship conflict. The study utilized data on 312 respondents working in a team structure at Korean companies and analyzed with structural equation modeling techniques to test the hypothesis. To verify the reliability and validity in this study applied the reliability test on the basis of internal consistency and the confirmatory factor analysis. The result of the study shows that affective trust had positive effects on knowledge sharing and individual creativity. Second, in contrast to previous research, task conflict and relationship conflict had non-significant impacts on knowledge sharing. Furthermore, on the contrary to previous findings, relationship conflict had a positive influence on individual creativity significantly. Third, knowledge sharing had a direct impact on individual creativity. Finally, the results present that knowledge sharing partially mediates the effect of affective trust on the individual creativity. We discuss the implications of these findings for effective facilitating knowledge sharing and individual creativity. The basis of our findings, we examine the assumption of scholars empirically that knowledge sharing will stimulate individual creativity. Furthermore, our findings provide theoretical implications that it can be difficult in Korean companies to generalize the previous research which relationship conflict will certainly hinder creativity. In addition, practical implications of this study emphasize the importance of constructing affectivetrust and activating knowledge sharing in the organization for enhancing individual creativity. Lastly, we present limitations of this study about the discriminant validity and the conception of cognitive trust and suggest future research directions.