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This study presents a new approach to examine how team members experience interpersonal differences. This approach offers a way to examine how team members experience their differences with specific other individuals, and how these differences are related to the amount of perceived conflict with these individuals in an organizational context. Data from a non-profit governmental institution in The Netherlands were analysed, including 80 participants from 15 diverse teams. Five types of differences were salient to the individuals in this sample: differences related to extraversion; work pose; approach to work; task-related expertise; and seniority. Furthermore, individuals tend to contrast positive and negative evaluations of differences related to extraversion and approaches to work, but to conceptualize positive and negative evaluations of task-related expertise, seniority, and work pose as more mutually independent phenomena. Moreover, we found that differences related to task-related expertise were negatively related to both task and relationship conflict. In contrast, differences related to extraversion were positively related to both task and relationship conflict. Finally, the approach-to-work cluster was positively related to only task conflict.The growth of diversity in the workforce over the past 20 years has spawned a lot of research on how within-unit differences in organizations are related to individuals' attitudes, behaviour, and performance. The conventional focus in these studies has been on connecting differences among team members on such variables as demographic characteristics, tenure, functional background, and educational background to such outcomes as team commitment, citizenship behaviour,

This article reports effects of perceived skill dissimilarity and perceived skill complementarity on dyadic helping behavior using a cross-lagged panel study. Specifically, the authors hypothesize that perceived skill dissimilarity is negatively related, whereas perceived skill complementarity is positively related, to self-rated and peer-rated dyadic helping behavior in teams. The authors compare the effects of both perceptions in a sample of 301 unilateral work relationships within 20 student research teams. The study shows that perceived skill dissimilarity is unrelated to self-rated and peer-rated dyadic helping behavior whereas perceived skill complementarity is positively related to both self-rated and peer-rated dyadic helping behavior.