Professor Jin Mengzi, along with her peers, discusses how the gender of collaborating dyads influences the link between intercultural conflict and the effectiveness of creative collaboration. This research was published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2020.

Collaboration across cultures can potentially increase creativity from accessing diverse ideas and perspectives, but this benefit is not always realised. One reason is that the conflict that arises in intercultural creative collaboration is a double-edged sword, and how this conflict is managed matters crucially. This research examines how the gender of collaborating dyads influences the link between intercultural conflict (task and relationship) and the effectiveness of creative collaboration. As creative collaborations occur in increasingly diverse cultural settings, this study extends current understanding of when and how intercultural collaborations can result in creativity benefits from a gender and conflict management perspective.

Key findings

The team conducts laboratory studies and field surveys in order to examine the outcome and process of collaboration, paying close attention to task and relationship conflicts. The laboratory study involves pairs of strangers working on a common creativity task for a short time, while the field survey examines longstanding collaborative relationships between pairs of intercultural colleagues at the workplace. The latter approach allows researchers to assess relationship conflict and its impact on creative collaboration more reliably, complementing the laboratory setting by improving external validity. The team argues that the gender of intercultural dyads influences how conflict is managed, shedding light on when and how intercultural collaboration translates into creativity benefits.

-Both studies consistently find that task conflict increases creative collaboration effectiveness for women dyads but decreases creative collaboration effectiveness for men dyads.

-The field survey finds that relationship conflict has a general negative effect on creative collaboration effectiveness, but this effect is stronger for women dyads than men dyads.

-There is evidence from both studies that information elaboration mediates the negative effect of intercultural task conflict on creative collaboration for men dyads.

-From the laboratory study, the team finds that the interactive effect of dyad gender and intercultural task conflict on information elaboration and creative collaboration effectiveness is due to differential conflict management approaches for intercultural women and men dyads. Women dyads adopt more integrative and less dominant conflict management approaches than men dyads, resulting in greater sharing and exchanging of ideas and hence collaborative creativity.

Contributions to Existing Literature

This study makes three key theoretical contributions.

-First, this study sheds light on why intercultural creative collaboration does not always lead to creative benefits even though the parties have access to non-redundant ideas and perspectives. The team also advances a contingency model wherein the creativity success of intercultural collaboration depends on the gender of the collaborating dyad, incorporating the gender of dyads and information elaboration as moderator and mediator respectively.

-Second, this study expands existing research on conflict and creativity. The team has also identified information elaboration as the key mechanism through which intercultural task and relationship conflict fosters or hinders creative performance under different gender compositions of dyadic collaborations. In this process, this study has showed that conflict can help or hurt creativity in specific conditions because of how conflict is managed.

-Third, this study contributes to emerging research on gender and creativity, by showing how women and men differentially engage in same-gender intercultural creative collaboration. From the results, the competitive approach that the man in a mixed-gender dyad takes during task conflict resolution could have derailed information elaboration. Conversely, in situations of mixed-gender relationship conflict, the woman’s focus on relational issues could have distracted the dyad from the task at hand. These results therefore highlight that, to fully understand the effects of gender on creativity and innovation, it is important to consider not only how men and women innovate individually, but also the gender of their collaborators.

Practical Implications

As the business environment becomes more culturally diverse, intercultural creative collaborations will be inevitable. This research suggests that there are opportunities and challenges for both men and women employees when collaborating across cultures to do creative work. Specifically, women dyads appear to be more adept at translating intercultural task conflict into creative benefits than men dyads. However, women dyads are also especially derailed if intercultural relationship conflict is high. Thus, when assembling intercultural dyads for creative projects, managers need to carefully consider these opportunities and challenges. One suggestion is for women dyads to engage in developing good relationships before engaging in intercultural creative collaboration, as that approach might mitigate the downsides of relationship conflict. For men dyads, the good news is that they seem relatively less distracted by relationship conflict. Equally, men could develop more cooperative conflict management approaches so that they too can harness the creativity benefits of intercultural task conflict. Last but not least, this study also hopes to stimulate future theorising about gender and innovation in organisations and societies.