Affective mechanisms linking dysfunctional behavior to performance in work teams: A moderated mediation study.

Abstract

The present study examines the association between dysfunctional team behavior and team performance. Data included measures of teams' dysfunctional behavior and negative affective tone as well as supervisors' ratings of teams' (nonverbal) negative emotional expressivity and performance. Utilizing a field sample of 61 work teams, the authors tested the proposed relationships with robust data analytic techniques. Results were consistent with the hypothesized conceptual scheme, in that negative team affective tone mediated the relationship between dysfunctional team behavior and performance when teams' nonverbal negative expressivity was high but not when nonverbal expressivity was low. On the basis of the findings, the authors conclude that the connection between dysfunctional behavior and performance in team situations is more complex than was previously believed-thereby yielding a pattern of moderated mediation. In sum, the findings demonstrated that team members' collective emotions and emotional processing represent key mechanisms in determining how dysfunctional team behavior is associated with team performance.

Thriving Organizational Sustainability through Innovation: Incivility Climate and Teamwork

“…This mechanism is consistent with the "spillover effect," which suggests that individuals become more mentally accessible when they observe their teammates acting in certain ways [23,24]. In previous studies of workgroup aggression, the spillover effect has been described as "contagious aggression," in which instigators set off team members one after another [13,25,26].…”

“…Team settings intensify the emergence of incivility even further, as shown in a study that examined dysfunctional behaviors at the team level [13]. Social learning theory [22] proposes that individuals model each other's actions after observing their behaviors.…”

“…It is also expected that the effect of team-level incivility on team-level outcomes is subject to boundary conditions. Several individual-level studies found that the impact of uncivil or dysfunctional behaviors is dependent on individual pro-social value orientation [12], nonverbal negative expressivity [13], and negative affectivity [59]. Conducting group-level studies to identify boundary conditions for the impact of incivility climate would be worthwhile.…”

“…Given that incivility studies have primarily been conducted at the individual level [13], the findings so far do not necessarily provide important insights about how incivility operates in team contexts. Individuals are bound by the organizational context in their behaviors [14], and importantly, findings at the individual level should not be assumed to be equivalent at other levels [15].…”

Focus on opportunities as a mediator of the relationship between business owners' age and venture growth

“…To investigate this possibility, we estimated an alternative path analytic model with venture growth as the antecedent and focus on opportunities as the outcome variable (the other variables in the model were identical). Researchers have suggested that testing such reversed causal models may provide preliminary evidence for the direction of causality (e.g., Cole, Walter, & Bruch, 2008). Results showed that the fit of this alternative model was significantly worse (Satorra-Bentler adjusted χ2 (42) = 45.63) than our hypothesized model (Satorra-Bentler adjusted χ2 (42) = 7.15; χ2 difference to alternative model = 38.48; p < .01).…”