Does status stability benefit or hurt team creativity? the roles of status legitimacy and team conflict

Status stability, which refers to the stability of team members’ relative status levels, has a profound effect on team effectiveness, but this effect may be either constructive or destructive; the literature has failed to reach consensus on this topic. To reconcile two contradictory views based on differentiating between different types of conflict, we constructed a comprehensive theoretical model of the mechanism underlying the effect of status stability; this model features relationship conflict and task conflict as mediators, status legitimacy as a moderator, and team creativity as an outcome variable. We also proposed four hypotheses on the basis of theoretical analysis. In this study, we used SPSS 23.0, AMOS 24.0 and R software to conduct empirical analysis and testing of 369 valid questionnaires collected from 83 teams using a two-stage measurement method. The results revealed that status stability negatively affects team creativity via task conflict and positively affects team creativity via relationship conflict. However, under the influence of status legitimacy, the negative effect is restrained, while the positive effect is enhanced. This study thus expands the research on the process mechanism and boundary conditions associated with status stability, and can serve as a useful reference for the design of the status structure of modern enterprises.