The Relationship among Different Types of Intra-team Conflict and Their Effects on Commitment in R&D Teams

Teams play an indispensable role in helping an organization achieve its goal. Since constant interaction among team members is the cornerstone of team competitiveness, it is necessary for the team members to commit themselves to shared goals-team commitment, a type of positive, emotional attitude of team members. Constant interactions among team members, however, inevitably breed a byproduct called conflict. Though intra-team conflict has both positive and negative effects on team performance, little research has been done to clarify the roles that relationship, task and process conflicts play in team commitment. This research is an empirical investigation of the relationship among the three types of conflicts－relationship, task and process conflicts－based on data collected from 232 R&D teams of 13 Korean companies. The analysis suggests that, while relationship conflict has a negative impact on team commitment, task and process conflicts have no significant impact on team commitment. As for the relationships among those three types of conflict, process conflict has positively influenced task, and relationship conflicts and task conflict also has had a positive impact on relationship conflict. Based on these results, this study has presented its implications and directions for future research.