Applying Conflict Management Styles to Resolve Task Conflict and Enhance Team Innovation

Task conflicts among group members have a significant impact on team creativity, so it is critical to identify which conflict resolution styles should be used. This paper aims to examine how various conflict management styles influence team creativity via task conflict. The empirical research was conducted using the Structural Equation Model (SEM) for a sample of 257 employees working for Vietnamese organizations. The results show that dominating style increases task conflict while combining and obliging styles reduce it. To take advantage of the creativity-related benefits associated with task conflict, team leaders should develop an open atmosphere that encourages participants' integrating styles, rather than dominating styles. The negative influence of obliging style reflects Vietnamese culture's high collectivism. The study provides various approaches for task conflict management and also highlights the role of controlling task conflicts in enhancing team innovation. It implies that employees will be able to work better as a team in practice if conflict management strategies are used in a flexible manner. It helps them to build a good connection and successfully implement new ideas. Further research should extend the conclusion of this analysis in various contexts to generalize the findings.

organizational communication and exchange of work-related opinions, thoughts. Nonetheless, a high level of task conflict might be detrimental to team effectiveness [4]. Meanwhile, other researchers have used a contingency method to determine if task conflict improves or degrades a range of team outcomes, including creativity [5].
More notably, Vietnamese culture is characterized by strong collectivism, power distance, conservatism, and paternalism [6]. It is contrast to individualistic cultures like the United States and Western Europe. Therefore, examining the impact of task conflict on team creativity in Vietnam, where opposing viewpoints are not often welcomed and a united collective voice and harmony are usually viewed as desired [7], is a conservative test. It motivates us to investigate the influence of conflict management styles on team creativity through task conflict in Vietnam -an emerging market.
This article is structured as follows: The second section includes a literature review and the development of hypotheses. The research process and research model are discussed in the following section. The results of the study are summarized in Section 4. Conclusions and implications for clinicians and scholars are discussed in Section 5.

2-1-Task Conflict
Workplace conflict has been proven to be inevitable in various studies. The difference in opinion, beliefs, views among employees leads to task conflict or relationship conflict [8]. Relationship conflicts are based on relationship problems that result from individual differences as well as differences in opinion and interests on non-task issues like religion, politics, and fashion, while task conflicts involve differences of viewpoints, ideas, and opinions in the group about the goals or content of the task being performed [9]. Employees usually consider the conflicts as "work disagreements", "work conflict", and "task problems". Rahim (2001) [10] defined task conflict as "conflict occurring when two or more organizational members disagree on their task or content issues". However, it has been proven in various studies that its mere presence is not the issue, but how it is managed determines whether conflict leads to a constructive or destructive outcome.

2-2-Conflict Management Styles
The way how a group member deals with the conflict is explained through various conflict management styles. A five-style or three-style model can be used to present the fundamental approaches [11]. Thomas (2008) [12] suggested five conflict resolution types: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Rahim (1983) [13] also introduces a five-style model focused on two aspects of "concern for self or others": dominating, integrating, obliging, avoiding, compromising. However, the components of a five-style model can be reduced and integrated into three specific conflict styles: (a) forcing or dominating, (b) solution-oriented or integrating, and (c) smoothing or obliging [14]. Our research follows a three-style approach.

Dominating style (Win-Lose strategy)
This style is characterized by a high degree of concern for oneself and a low level of concern for others, suggesting a win-lose strategy or pushing actions to achieve one's own position or goal without regard for others. This style displays a violent, inflexible approach and shows competing attitudes linked with aggression [15]. Using a dominating style could lead to higher levels of conflict, so it is appropriate in urgent situations or for an unimportant problem [16]. H1: Dominating style has a positive impact on task conflict.

Obliging style (Lose-Win Strategy)
This style is also known as accommodating which emerges from a lack of concern for oneself and a strong concern for others. Individuals with an obliging style tend to place others' interests ahead of their own, downplaying discrepancies and emphasizing commonalities to persuade others' concerns [17]. This obligating style is applied while individuals display self-dedicated behavior by ignoring their needs for the other group, habitually resulting in a losewin outcome. This style can also be used to preserve a relationship especially when the relationship is more important than the issue. It may be appropriate for Asian working environments because Asian countries' character is mostly collectivism [18].
H2: Obliging style has a negative impact on task conflict.

Integrating style (Win-Win Strategy)
This approach focuses on working together to find a solution, indicating a strong concern for oneself and others. It reflects openness, information sharing, and a thorough analysis of disparities to get an efficient solution that is agreeable to all parties. In other words, Individuals who are involved in conflicts try to come up with creative and imaginative approaches that not only satisfy their own needs but also meet those of others [19]. When the problems are complicated, this style works well in integrating the expertise and knowledge of multiple parties to formulate and execute ideas effectively. This style is often linked to less task conflict [20]. As a result, the integrating style is seen as efficient and sufficient in settling conflicts. Integrating and accommodating styles assist workgroup participants in getting to know one another better and feeling prepared to complete tasks.
H3: Integrating style has a negative impact on task conflict.

2-3-Team Innovation
Team creativity is described as the product of efforts to develop and incorporate new and improved ways of doing things [21]. It is the creation and development of new concepts, practices, or processes that are helpful to the team [22]. Researchers have used a contingency approach to find out whether task conflict improves or damages team outcomes (including innovation) when considering the relationship between task conflict and creativity [23].
First, some previous studies have found that task conflict has a positive effect on team creativity [24]. Task conflict is likely to encourage various thoughts and the exchanging of a wider variety of ideas on related issues at the workplace [25]. When a workgroup is faced with task disputes, they are more innovative in their thinking [26]. Minor conflicts can inspire group members to seek better options or solutions [27]. Since diverse views and experiences are exchanged, constructive dialogue and conversation are likely to boost a team's innovation. Conflict is likely to encourage learning and the generation of fresh, potentially innovative ideas, resulting in a more competitive and inventive team [28].
On the contrary, many researchers have noted the negative impact of task conflict on team effectiveness. Job disagreement hinders one's ability to interpret, absorb, and analyze knowledge [29], which can have a negative effect on creativity. Where there is a lot of task tension, the role of the team members executing the task becomes more ambiguous, and success declines as a result. When task-related disagreement grows, teams are less able to form and sustain cohesive teams [30]. As a result, team members are less able to work well or produce new strategies or solutions. As a result, we believe task conflict has a negative impact on team performance.
H4: Task conflict is negatively related to team innovation.

3-1-Data
Primary data for hypotheses testing was collected from full-time employees working for companies or organizations in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, using an online survey questionnaire. There are seven items for integrating style, five for obliging style, three for dominating style, three for task conflict, and six for team innovation in the questionnaire. Items used in this study were all originally written in English, but participants are Vietnamese. The survey items were first translated into Vietnamese, then back-translated into English by bilingual experts and researchers to reconcile all differences and refine the wording. Five research associates with expertise in human resource administration pre-tested and then updated a draft of the questionnaire in Vietnam. The survey was reviewed by 30 staff from various organizations to identify problems with terminology, content, and question ambiguity. Some minor changes were made in response to their feedback. After we conducted an official survey, out of 320 responses, 257 were appropriate.
As shown in Table 1, the demographic profile of the respondents indicates that the sample consisted of more females (56.4%) than males (43.6%) but this difference only accounts for less than 15%. With regards to age, the majority of employees (26.8%) belong to the age group of 25 to less than 30 years old and the results also showed that there is a fair mix of age groups. 65 percent of the participants in the study have a bachelor's degree, while 18.7% have a master's degree. In terms of experience, the majority of respondents (51.8%) have fewer than three years of experience.

3-2-Measures
The items used for each model in this analysis were adapted from previous studies (as shown in Appendix I). First, conflict management styles were created using the Rahim (1983)'s Organizational Conflict Inventory-II as cited earlier.
The scale's validity is demonstrated by its ability to differ conflict management styles. As mentioned above, the components of a five-style model can be reduced and integrated into a three-style model: (a) forcing or dominating, (b) solution-oriented or integrating, and (c) smoothing or obliging. Although Rahim's original scale were elicited for all five conflict-management styles, this study only focused on the three conflict-management strategies (dominating, integrating, and obliging). The Likert scale responses ranged from strongly disagreement (1) to strongly agreement (7).
Next, we evaluated team creativity using Anderson and West (1998)'s scale [31], which refers to employees' perceptions of the team's ability to generate and share new ideas. The following are two sample items for innovation: "My team is always moving toward the development of new answers" and "People in the team co-operate to help develop and apply new ideas". A seven-point Likert scale (1 = total disagreement, 7 = total agreement) was used to collect data on team innovation.
Finally, we used three items developed by Jehn and Mannix (2001) [32] to measure task conflict, with the scale describing overall workplace task conflict. This scale is also used by Yu and Mary (2018) [33] and Tafvelin (2020) [34]. The participants, for example, were asked to respond to the item: "How frequently do you have disagreements within your team about the task of the project you are working on". Participants indicated how much they related to the content of each item, using a Likert-style scale ranging from 1 = none to 7 = a great deal. We applied the Brislin's method [35] to translate all survey instruments from English to Vietnamese: (1) A native Vietnamese speaker who was fluent at English translated the original scales into Vietnamese; (2) A bilingual professional translator who was blinded to backtranslate the original version into English; (3) the authors compared and found no discrepancies between the two versions.

3-3-Data Analysis
Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to evaluate our theoretical model. This method is commonly used in business and management research [14]. PLS-SEM solves several problems of covariancebased structural equation modeling (CB-SEM). First, PLS-SEM provides accurate model estimations for small sample sizes [36]. The minimum recommended sample size for PLS-SEM, according to Chin & Newsted (1999) [37], is 30 to 100. Second, unlike CB-SEM based on maximum probability, PLS-SEM is a nonparametric method that does not assume data is normally distributed.
To test the proposed models, we used SmartPLS version 3.0 and the two-step analysis technique. First, we checked the validity and reliability of the measures. Second, we use a bootstrapping approach (1000 resamples) to determine the significance levels for path coefficients.

4-1-Measurement Model Assessment
The reliability and validity of the construct measures are used to evaluate the measurement model. The criteria such as internal consistency reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were proposed by Hair et al. (2017) [38]. The internal consistency reliability of constructs was first tested using composite reliability (CR) and Cronbach's alpha. The CR and Cronbach alpha scores in the study were also higher than the cut-off value of 0.7, as seen in Table 4. Second, the outer loadings of the indicators and the average variance extracted were used to determine convergent validity (AVE). Items with outer loadings greater than 0.40 should be kept for analysis. In this analysis, all outer loadings were greater than 0.7. Another standard criterion for determining convergent validity at the construct level is AVE. AVE was greater than 0.5, suggesting that the construct explained more than half of the variance of its indicators [39]. Third, in terms of discriminant validity, we made sure that each construct's square root of AVE was greater than its association with other constructs. The Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) values were also smaller than the 0.85 thresholds [40]. As shown in Tables 2 and 3, our analysis has discriminant validity.

4-2-Structural Model Assessment
Before testing hypotheses, we checked for collinearity between constructs. Collinearity was investigated using the variance inflation factor (VIF) value. Since all VIF values were below the threshold of 5, collinearity among the constructs was not a significant issue in this analysis. By bootstrapping 1,000 samples, the P-values were used to determine the statistical significance of our hypotheses. The key parameters obtained for the model in the structural evaluation are depicted in Figure 3. First, we tested the relationship between conflict management styles and task conflict. Table 5 reveals that dominating style has a significant positive impact on task conflict (β = 0.375, p = 0.000), while integrating and obliging styles have significant negative effects (β = -0.189, p = 0.011; and = -0.188, p = 0.000, respectively). The findings are consistent with the findings of Darawong (2017), who studies the direct effect of conflict management styles on task conflict and relationship conflict between marketing and R&D staff in Thai manufacturing companies throughout the new product development process [41]. Individuals who use a dominating style tend to actively use their intelligence, experience, and power to defeat the ideas of others, regardless of the other party. When members of a group use an integrating style, on the other hand, they are more likely to share thoughts and listen openly to others in order to find the best solution. Task-related information is incorporated into the communication and decision-making process, resulting in a low probability of task conflict. An integrating style encourages positive project improvements, while a dominant style leads to violent conflict. Regarding obliging style, it can improve cohesion and social desirability, reducing task conflict. Vietnamese people, like Thais, showed a preference for obliging style [42] because Asians frequently want to maintain a good connection with another party, and they will typically try to make compromises to suit the other party's requirements, establish harmony, and also show the high degree of collaboration [43]. Which conflict styles are chosen depends much on the situation. Employees' conflict solving strategies are influenced by culture [44]; for example, it can be expected that collectivism is favorably correlated with integrating and obliging styles. For example, Indonesians, who are collectivists, favor incorporating and obliging models, while Americans, who are individualistic, prefer integrating and dominating styles [45]. Hence, our findings may be appropriate for Asian working environments because Asian countries' character is mostly collectivism.
Second, we discovered evidence for H4, which predicted a negative association between task conflict and team innovation (β = -0.191, p = 0.001). High levels of task conflict can cause cognitive overload or negative emotion, both of which are detrimental to team creativity. In other words, conflicts and frustrations stifle team cooperation, which is essential for creating, assessing, and choosing the most innovative and creative ideas. Individuals' ability to interact, cooperate, and organize efficiently is impaired by task conflict [46]. As De Dreu (2006), as cited earlier, also stated: "Increasingly high compared to moderate levels of task conflict, however, produce the stress, interpersonal tension, and distrust that prohibit people from focusing on the problem and from open-mindedly generating ideas. It also reduces team members' motivation to work together in selecting and implementing adequate problem solutions".
The effect size f 2 determines whether an exogenous construct has a significant influence on an endogenous construct. 0.02, 0.15, and 0.35 were used to describe small, medium, and large effects, respectively [47]. The f 2 values for all combinations of endogenous and exogenous constructs are also reported in Table 5. The effect sizes for all exogenous latent variables were greater than 0.02, meaning that they had small to medium effects.

5-Conclusion
This study contributed to the philosophy of conflict management by examining how different types of conflict management influence task conflict. The results show that dominating style increases task conflict while combining and obliging styles reduce it. This study also presents that task conflict has a negative effect on team creativity. High levels of task tension can lead to negative emotional feelings and, as a result, a reduction in team creativity. Our results imply that team leaders who want to boost innovation should keep task conflict in control. They can create contact networks from which members can communicate and collect feedback, for example, to hold task conflict to a minimum. However, all of the responses were limited to the Vietnam context, which may reduce the generalizability of our results. Vietnam's cultural, economic, and institutional mechanisms have been reported to be different from developed countries. Therefore, researchers should be cautious when extending the conclusion of this analysis in other contexts.

6-2-Data Availability Statement
The data presented in this study are available in article.

6-3-Funding
The authors received the financial support from the University of Finance -Marketing for the research.

6-4-Conflicts of Interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interests regarding the publication of this manuscript. In addition, the ethical issues, including plagiarism, informed consent, misconduct, data fabrication and/or falsification, double publication and/or submission, and redundancies have been completely observed by the authors.