When the conflicts people experienced at work were task oriented, they resulted in positive effects on work engagement as employees had opportunities to express their opinions and make decisions during the resolution process. This supported employees’ perceptions of safety and resource availability. Work engagement, in turn, increased employees’ knowledge sharing behavior.
Conversely, relationship conflict was shown to have deleterious effects on employees’ work engagement. Relationship conflict degraded employees’ sense of belonging and meaningful work, increased their sense of threat, and distracted them from work leaving them feeling less capable of performing well. This resulted in less engaged employees with significantly reduced motivation to share knowledge with coworkers.
This study reveals that the type of work conflict makes all the difference for work engagement and knowledge sharing. Work engagement and thus knowledge sharing can be improved if we create workplaces that support meaningful work, psychological safety, and the availability of resources for employees, in which task conflict leads to constructive solutions. Likewise, preempting relationship conflict by taking steps to improve interpersonal trust among employees will encourage an atmosphere of engagement and knowledge sharing. References: Chen, Z.J., Zhang, X. & Vogel, D. (2011). Exploring the underlying processes between conflict and knowledge sharing: a work–engagement perspective. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 41, pp. 1005–1033, doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2011.00745.x
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