Task Conflict, and Team Performance

This study conceptualized exploratory and exploitative learning as distinct team-level activities, constructed measures of them, and examined their rela-tionships with psychological safety, task conflict, and team performance. Struc-tural equation analysis in a sample of 142 innovation project teams indicated that psychological safety was linearly and nonlinearly related to team exploit-ative and exploratory learning, respectively; whereas task conflict positive-ly moderated the relationship between psychological safety and exploitative learning. Furthermore, exploratory and exploitative learning were additively related to team performance, as rated by team managers, and mediated its rela-tionship with psychological safety. The findings contribute to understanding how and under what conditions organizational teams engage in exploratory and exploitative learning to maximize their performance