Intra-organizational routineaand collaboration performance: the role of task conflict and relationship conflict

Intra-organizational collaboration has become an increasingly important element of today’s business environment. However, failure rates of strategic alliances are alarmingly high. As a result, understanding, the causes for failure and devising solutions has been the concern of numerous studies. More recently, intra-organizational routines alignment has been shown to play a role in influencing collaboration performance. To understand this relationship in more detail, employing an experimental design, this study examines the role which the process variable of conflict plays in the relationship between intra-organizational routines alignment and collaboration performance. It is proposed that different types of conflict (relationship conflict vs. task conflict) will have different influencing effects. However, the results show no support for the proposed assumptions and it becomes apparent that a more sophisticated experimental design is required to allow for a more accurate representation and measurement of the variables under investigation.