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Hierarchy has the potential to both benefit and harm team effectiveness. In this article, we meta-analytically investigate different explanations for why and when hierarchy helps or hurts team effectiveness, drawing on results from 54 prior studies (N = 13,914 teams). Our findings show that, on net, hierarchy negatively impacts team effectiveness (performance: ρ = -.08; viability: ρ = -.11), and that this effect is mediated by increased conflict-enabling states. Additionally, we show that the negative relationship between hierarchy and team performance is exacerbated by aspects of the team structure (i.e., membership instability, skill differentiation) and the hierarchy itself (i.e., mutability), which make hierarchical teams prone to conflict. The predictions regarding the positive effect of hierarchy on team performance as mediated by coordination-enabling processes, and the moderating roles of several aspects of team tasks (i.e., interdependence, complexity) and the hierarchy (i.e., form) were not supported, with the exception that task ambiguity enhanced the positive effects of hierarchy. Given that our findings largely support dysfunctional views on hierarchy, future research is needed to understand when and why hierarchy may be more likely to live up to its purported functional benefits. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Whereas the positive relationship between positive affect in teams and team performance is well established, the relationship between team negative affect and team performance seems to be subject to moderating effects. We focus on the effects of perspective taking as one of these moderators, and posit that perspective taking impedes team performance when team state affect is negative because team members become preoccupied with others' negative emotions. Results from 49 teams involved in a computerized interactive decision-making task support our hypothesis: Negative state affect was negatively related to performance for teams high in perspective taking, but not for teams low in perspective taking. This leads to the conclusion that when teams experience high negative affect, they benefit from low perspective taking.