| Summary |
Yi-Ciou Li, 2008.06
Department of Transportation Technology and Management National Chiao Tung University
There are more and more organizations take team work to improve their performance, but it also raise the problems of conflict. The interpersonal conflict would reduce the employee and group performance, but some research argued that “task conflict” could have positive effects on group performance. However, this theory has no consensus result among investigations. The purpose of this study is to clarify the relationships between conflict types and performance, by taking “job involvement” and “group value congruence” as mediating variables. We tried to formulate five hypotheses to construct the path affected model and attempt to explain the divergence of previous result.
We took once in-depth interview and twice pretests to develop our questionnaire, which included “relation conflict”, “task conflict”, “process conflict”, “value congruence”, ”job involvement”, “job satisfaction” and “personal information.” Meanwhile, we collected performance data from our investigating bus companies. This survey was conducted with 1130 bus drivers as subjects, and the valid samples was 606. We used SEM and regression analysis to test the hypotheses. Major results are as follow:
In each conflict model, group value congruence had positive effects on job satisfaction and group performance. Also, Job involvement had positive effects on job satisfaction andindividual performance.
In relation conflict model, group value congruence and job involvement had both negatively related to relation conflict. Accordingly, relation conflict had significant negative effects on job satisfaction, individual and group performance.
In task conflict model, group value congruence and job involvement contained negative relation with task conflict. However, we used multiple-group analysis and regression analysis to test the relationship between task conflict and job involvement, the result showed that high-level task conflict could provoke employees into their work. Accordingly, task conflict had different effects on job satisfaction and performance. This finding was cohered with the divergence of previous result.
In process model, job satisfaction and individual / group performance also had negative relation to process conflict, concerning the mediating effects of group value congruence and job involvement.
According to the research results, we discussed the managerial implications and proposed several suggestions about conflict and performance management. |
