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Conflict is a pervasive and inevitable social and organizational phenomenon (Zhang et al., 2015; Rahim et al., 2002; Saeed et al., 2014). Given this inevitability and its nature as the outcome of human interaction, conflict must be managed (Rahim, 2002; Goncalves et al., 2016). According to Rahim et al. (2000) conflict occurs when an individual’s attitudes, values or beliefs are incongruent with others. The old view holds that conflict is a pure destructive phenomenon and only has negative consequences. This view ignores the fact that organizational conflict can have negative and positive consequences (Rahim et al., 2000; Zhang et al., 2015; Ohbuchi et al., 1994). The dilemma is how to manage the conflicts and means by which a firm can adopt proper conflict management styles (CMSs) that lead to positive outcomes. These Possible positive outcomes of the effective CMSs lead to enhanced innovation performance (He et al., 2014).
CMSs refer to methods or approaches that regulate an individual behavior in dealing with conflicts (He et al., 2014). It is a practice of handling organizational conflict in an efficient manner (Saeed et al., 2014). Studies have revealed that adoption of a proper conflict management style (CMS) can improve performance and innovation outcomes (He et al., 2014). Innovation is the deliberate introduction of novel ideas, processes, procedures, products and services by teams within an organization (Rogers, 2003). Innovation is a result of constant interaction within teams inside an organization (West and Hirst, 2003). Hence, resolving problems of teams would affect innovation performance at organizations.
Furthermore, being part of an intensive IT industry, rapidly changing global market, and severe competition, telecommunication companies should be flexible and agile to enhance their innovation performance (IP). Managing organizational conflict effectively is one of the essential factors that face telecommunication companies to enhance innovation and leverage its agility (Zhang et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2012). Reviewing literature has revealed that prior studies were mainly conducted in western context and conflict management domain has been researched in political science, but is still under research from the business and management perspectives (Caputo, 2018; Posthuma, 2011).
Furthermore, the existing research is mainly devoted to exploring job satisfaction (Chen et al., 2012), team innovation (He et al., 2014), customer satisfaction (Mazaheri, 2011), ethnic conflict (Reade and Lee, 2016), and emotional intelligence (Zhang et al., 2015). To fill this research gap in the conflict management literature, empirical research is needed to understand antecedents to firm's innovation performance from the CMSs perspective. Research has shown that despite the fact that CMSs approach is crucial to understanding how and why managers use conflict style and persist with it, few studies have been conducted based on the possible organizational agility (OA) antecedents that mediate the relationship between CMSs and Firms IP. Moreover, an extensive review of conflict management literature indicates that there has not been any attempt to empirically predict IP from conflict management perspective in the telecommunication context.
Therefore, this research aims to: