| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立交通大學 === 教育研究所 === 104 === Previous studies indicated that conflicts could improve the efficiency and efficacy of teamwork and brought about more creativity in a team (Baron, 1991). In a project team, members came with diverse specialties, easily confronting conflicts because of different opinions and stances toward the task; besides, members tended to adapt themselves to a situation with various ways (Yong, Sauer, &; Mannix, 2014). This research conducted in a vocational high school club aimed to understand how members perceived conflicts in a project team and how coping strategies affected creative thinking and products.
This research takes team conflicts proposed by Jehn (1995) as the theory. It is observed what task and relationship conflicts occurred in a team when students carried on the creative task and what sub-factors between these two categories could be extracted from. Huang (1999), based on the analysis of Chinese culture and canons, has proposed a Chinese model of conflict copying to describe the unique coping strategies Chinese used when facing conflicts. She used self-benefiting or self-opinion concerning and other-benefiting or other-opinion concerning as the x-axis and y-axis respectively to distinguish four categories of coping strategies. Four categories of coping strategies denote negotiating (concerning both self and others’ benefits and opinions), tolerating (concerning only others’ benefits and opinion), contest (concerning only self benefits and opinions) and avoidance (concerning neither self nor others’ benefits and opinions). Each category is composed by three smaller-scale strategies. This research was based on Chinese model of conflict copying to explore what coping strategies were taken by team members of high school age. Data collections included recording of team discussion, questionnaire and interview; content analysis was used to analyze the collected data and inter-raters reliability was analyzed. Samples consisted of four project teams (two to three people per team) and each team should work together to design and complete a project (a column in school magazine). The scoring on ideas and the products of the column adopted the standard process of consensual assessment technique (Amabile, 1996) with rubric on the novelty and practicability of both team ideas and products.
The results showed that “task conflict” contained three sub-factors: the disparity between idea generation and practice, the conjecture and anxiety about opinion difference, and the negative evaluation about ideas proposed. Dissatisfying behaviors and performance, unequal status and unfamiliarity among team members also comprised of three sub-factors in “relationship conflicts.” The Chinese model of conflict copying could effectively illustrate members’ coping strategies in which 10 out of 12 coping strategies were adopted among team members while only two most negative copying strategies were not used. Based on the conflict types, the coping strategies adopted, the four groups in the study were thus given the names of Couple With Different Schemes, Team of Flying Daggers, Calm and Rocky, and Happy and Easy. The highest score of the product creativity fell on the Calm and Rocky, followed by Happy and Easy. The columns conducted by Couple With Different Schemes and Team of Flying Daggers were graded as the lower creativity. The products of four groups were characterized as high novelty and high practicality, high novelty and low resolution, low novelty and high resolution and low novelty and low resolution respectively.
Two conflict factors, the disparity between idea generation and practice toward the task and unfamiliarity among team members, affected creativity level of the final product while the conjecture and anxiety about opinion difference of the task, and the negative evaluation about proposed ideas affected the creativity level of ideas about column. In coping strategies, the high creative team used more negotiating strategies whereas other coping strategies showed insignificant differences between high and low creative teams. Thus, the result of this study may bring a new perspective to ultimately benefit future industries, government/schools and other institutes to realize what conflicts occur in a project team, and how members’ coping strategies affect creativity level of idea generating and final product.
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