Members’ needs, intragroup conflict, and group performance.

Abstract

Focusing on "what people want in their group" as a critical antecedent of intragroup conflict, the present study theorizes and empirically investigates the relationships among the psychological needs of group members, intragroup conflict, and group performance. It attends to the within-group average and dispersion of members' psychological needs and examines the effects stemming from group composition of needs on multiple types of conflict. The analyses based on multisource data from 145 organizational teams revealed significant relationships between the groups' composition with respect to the members' need for achievement and task conflict, need for affiliation and relationship conflict, and need for power and status conflict. Some of these relationships were moderated by open communication among members. The analyses also demonstrated that when the 3 types of conflict were considered together, task conflict was a positive predictor of group performance, whereas relationship conflict was a negative predictor. The findings highlight the motivational aspects of intragroup conflict, revealing the multilevel dynamics of the psychological needs in social settings.

Positive Group Affective Tone and Team Creative Performance and Change‐Oriented Organizational Citizenship Behavior: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…Bliese's (1998) estimation of ICC values revealed that ICC(2) values higher than .70 were hardly found in groups of fewer than 10 members. For this reason, a number of unit-level studies have reported ICC(2) values lower than .70 (e.g., Cerne, Nerstad, Dysvik, & Skerlavaj, 2014;Chun & Choi, 2014;Ehrhart, 2004;Kirkman, Chen, Farh, Chen, & Lowe, 2009;Wu, Tsui, & Kinicki, 2010). Although scholars maintain that high withinteam agreement (r wg(j) > .70) and between-team variability (significant F-statistics) can justify low ICC(2) values (Bliese, 1998(Bliese, , 2000Kirkman et al, 2009;Wu et al, 2010), future research may need to collect data from larger teams to obtain more reliable measures of team-level constructs and accurately capture team-level phenomena.…”

On the relationship between intragroup conflict and social capital in teams: A longitudinal investigation in Taiwan

“…Although conflict mostly occurs during an interpersonal interaction within a team, members experiencing conflict can influence the behaviors of other team members through emotional contagion, which refers to the process of team members subconsciously adapting the emotions of one another (Emich, ). Conflict is widely deemed as a collective phenomenon (Chun & Choi, ; Jehn, ; Jehn & Chatman, ; Peterson & Behfar, ; Simons & Peterson, ). Thus, conflict can be treated as a group‐level variable and refers to the level of disagreement among group members (De Wit et al, ).…”

“…Although conflict mostly occurs during an interpersonal interaction within a team, members experiencing conflict can influence the behaviors of other team members through emotional contagion, which refers to the process of team members subconsciously adapting the emotions of one another (Emich, 2014). Conflict is widely deemed as a collective phenomenon (Chun & Choi, 2014;Jehn, 1995;Jehn & Chatman, 2000;Peterson & Behfar, 2003;Simons & Bonding ties create the opportunity to act together (Adler & Kwon, 2002) and assume the opportunity exists to make the exchange and to produce information benefits (Nahapiet & Ghoshal, 1998). Thus, opportunity is the key to create structural social capital.…”

“…Intragroup conflict is regarded as a core interactional property and essential to the group process (Chun & Choi, 2014;Jehn, Greer, Levine, & Szulanski, 2008). It is defined as the process resulting from an antagonistic interaction among team members due to real or perceived differences (De Wit, Greer, & Jehn, 2012).…”

On the dimensionality of intragroup conflict

“…position promotion, increased salary, etc.). Research indicates that individuals with a high need for achievement tend to be creative, generating a large number of solutions to a given problem (Chun and Choi, 2014). This proactive competition could arouse team members' work initiatives and creativity and thus improve team innovation performance.…”