Team creativity is increasingly seen by companies as a competitive advantage in response to a rapidly-changing marketplace. It is also something that companies can enhance with the right understanding and conditions.

Research by Jiing-Lih Farh, Cynthia Lee and Crystal I.C. Farh finds that team creativity can be improved through task conflict so long as the conflict is at a moderate level and occurs in the early phase of a project.

"Teams that discuss a variety of ideas and opinions are likely to generate more creative solutions," they say. "Task conflict is known to stimulate team members' exposure to divergent perspectives and it is thought to increase creativity through the influence of minority dissent - that is, when a minority team member publicly opposes the beliefs, attitudes, ideas, procedures or policies of the majority."

"This logic suggests some task conflict is necessary for fostering the divergent thinking and information search that contributes to creativity. But too much task conflict may lead to a reduced capacity to perceive, process and evaluate information, and team members may subsequently lose sight of the collective goal or become frustrated by the lack of progress."

Moderate levels of task conflict are more likely to contribute to creative outcomes in the early phases of project when the focus is on strategy formulation and team members have the time and resources to invest in discussing, exploring and incorporating novel ideas.

Evidence for these arguments is drawn from a real setting - revenue-generating project teams in the Greater China service division of a Fortune 50 multinational IT firm, which is also ranked consistently among the 20 most creative companies in the world.

The researchers worked with a senior manager at the company in 2005 to identify and contact project teams. Altogether 422 team members and 71 project managers of 71 teams participated in the study.

The project managers were asked to assess project life cycle, background and creativity, while team members assessed task conflict and such control variables as relationship conflict.

Task conflict was measured on a scale from 1 (never) to 5 (always) and as the task conflict level increased, so did team creativity, until task conflict hit 2.8 on the scale. Beyond that peak, creativity declined, supporting the view that moderate task conflict is beneficial to creativity but too much conflict is not.

In terms of timing, teams were divided in half: those that had not yet reached the sample's mean project completion level of 57.6 per cent where considered in the "early" phase, those that had advanced further along were in the "later" phase. Creativity in the early phase teams peaked as task conflict approached 2.6, then declined. In the later phase teams, task conflict was unrelated to team creativity.

The authors say the results show team managers should encourage some level of task conflict in the early phases of projects and communicate to team members that this conflict is good.

However, they should also be mindful that defining "task conflict" remains a challenge even among researchers. Diversity of opinions could be a good starting point but the authors also caution that managers take care to monitor the degree of task conflict so it does not escalate into a destructive process.

"Managers should build a psychologically safe team climate early on in the project so that team members feel safe to bring up ideas that may be counter to the majority opinion. However, managers should find ways to integrate ideas as they are raised by team members into a creative solution, rather than letting the team bring forth new ideas simply for the sake of discussion," they say.