Direct and Contextual Influence of Team Conflict on Team Resources, Team Work Engagement, and Team Performance

This article focuses on team conflict’s direct influence on both team work engagement and team performance, as well as on its moderator role in the relationship between team resources and team work engagement and in the relationship between team work engagement and team performance. Data were collected from 82 research teams and team leaders, using electronic questionnaires; data on these teams’ objective performance was also obtained. We found a direct influence of only task conflict on team work engagement. Moderation analysis revealed that relationship conflict weakens the relationship between team resources and team work engagement, whereas task conflict strengthens the relationship between team work engagement and team performance. Therefore, relationship conflict has a detrimental effect for the development of a positive emergent state of work engagement; on the contrary, discussing ideas positively influences the transformation of the team’s level of engagement into objective performance. This article analyzed the role of both relationship and task conflict within the context of the job demands–resources model (Bakker, Demerouti, & Sanz-Vergel, 2014; Demerouti & Bakker, 2011) at the team level. This model considers work engagement as an important predictor of job performance and as dependent on job resources and job demands. This study considered team conflict as a job demand that directly influences team work engagement and team performance and that also moderates the relationship between team resources and team work engagement, as well as the relationship between team work engagement and team performance. The goal of this study was to understand whether the two types of conflict impact differently on proximal (team work engagement) and distal (team performance) team outcomes, directly; simultaneously, we explore the moderator influence of team conflict on the job demands–resources model. More specifically, relationship conflict was conceptualized as a job demand that undermines the motivational role of team job resources for the emergence of team work engagement; task conflict was conceptualized as a job demand that may, actually, facilitate the performance of engaged teams. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, it adds to the literature on employee engagement, specifically on team work engagement, a construct that has recently received researchers’ attention (Costa, Passos, & Bakker, 2014a; Torrente, Salanova, Llorens, & Schaufeli, 2012), by exploring how its level is influenced by both task and relational conflict. Team work engagement is a new construct that needs to be tested empirically in order to understand its specific contributions to teamwork and team

[1]  K. Jehn,et al.  It could be worse: a study on the alleviating roles of trust and connectedness in intragroup conflict. , 2007 .

[2]  Ivana B. Petrović,et al.  Work Engagement in Serbia: Psychometric Properties of the Serbian Version of the Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES) , 2017, Front. Psychol..

[3]  Michael Christian,et al.  WORK ENGAGEMENT: A QUANTITATIVE REVIEW AND TEST OF ITS RELATIONS WITH TASK AND CONTEXTUAL PERFORMANCE , 2011 .

[4]  E. Lazear,et al.  Rank-Order Tournaments as Optimum Labor Contracts , 1979, Journal of Political Economy.

[5]  A. Bakker,et al.  Job Resources Boost Work Engagement, Particularly When Job Demands Are High , 2007 .

[6]  Marisa Salanova,et al.  Teams make it work: how team work engagement mediates between social resources and performance in teams. , 2012, Psicothema.

[7]  A. Bakker,et al.  Where to go from here : Integration and future research on work engagement , 2009 .

[8]  Kenneth H. Price,et al.  Process and Outcome Expectations for the Dialectical Inquiry, Devil's Advocacy, and Consensus Techniques of Strategic Decision Making , 1991 .

[9]  John E. Mathieu,et al.  A Temporally Based Framework and Taxonomy of Team Processes , 2001 .

[10]  A. Bakker,et al.  Burnout and engagement at work as a function of demands and control. , 2001, Scandinavian journal of work, environment & health.

[11]  L. James,et al.  Estimating within-group interrater reliability with and without response bias. , 1984 .

[12]  Karen A. Jehn,et al.  The impact of intragroup conflict on effectiveness: A multimethod examination of the benefits and detriments of conflict. , 1992 .

[13]  Michael P. Leiter,et al.  Work Engagement : A Handbook of Essential Theory and Research , 2010 .

[14]  S. Schneider,et al.  Experiencing Diversity, Conflict, and Emotions in Teams , 2003 .

[15]  A. Bakker,et al.  The job demands-resources model : state of the art , 2007 .

[16]  S Folkman,et al.  Coping and physical health during caregiving: the roles of positive and negative affect. , 2000, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[17]  Daantje Derks,et al.  Development and validation of the job crafting scale , 2012 .

[18]  A. Bakker,et al.  Work engagement: Further reflections on the state of play , 2011 .

[19]  A. Bakker,et al.  Job Crafting at the Team and Individual Level , 2013 .

[20]  Responding to conflict at work and individual well-being: The mediating role of flight behaviour and feelings of helplessness , 2005 .

[21]  A. Bakker,et al.  Weekly work engagement and flourishing: The role of hindrance and challenge job demands , 2013 .

[22]  K. R. Milner,et al.  A multiple-goal, multilevel model of feedback effects on the regulation of individual and team performance. , 2004, The Journal of applied psychology.

[23]  A. Bakker,et al.  Team work engagement: A model of emergence , 2014 .

[24]  K. Jehn,et al.  INTERPERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS AND TASK PERFORMANCE: AN EXAMINATION OF MEDIATING PROCESSES IN FRIENDSHIP AND ACQUAINTANCE GROUPS. , 1996 .

[25]  P. Bliese.  Within-group agreement, non-independence, and reliability: Implications for data aggregation and analysis. , 2000 .

[26]  Leslie A. DeChurch,et al.  Moving beyond relationship and task conflict: toward a process-state perspective. , 2013, The Journal of applied psychology.

[27]  Conlon,et al.  Behind the music: conflict, performance, longevity and turnover in punk and new wave bands. , 2009 .

[28]  P. Bentler,et al.  Cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis : Conventional criteria versus new alternatives , 1999 .

[29]  C. D. De Dreu,et al.  Task versus relationship conflict, team performance, and team member satisfaction: a meta-analysis. , 2003, The Journal of applied psychology.

[30]  Catarina Marques Santos,et al.  Team mental models, relationship conflict and effectiveness over time , 2013 .

[31]  Mervi Ruokolainen,et al.  Job Demands and Resources as Antecedents of Work Engagement: A Longitudinal Study. , 2007 .

[32]  Nathan P. Podsakoff,et al.  A Meta-Analytic Test of the Challenge Stressor–Hindrance Stressor Framework: An Explanation for Inconsistent Relationships Among Stressors and Performance , 2005 .

[33]  S. Schulz-Hardt,et al.  Group decision making in hidden profile situations: dissent as a facilitator for decision quality. , 2006, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[34]  Karen A. Jehn,et al.  Interpersonal relationships and task performance: An examination of mediation processes in friendship and acquaintance groups. , 1997 .

[35]  A. Bakker,et al.  Burnout and Work Engagement: The JD–R Approach , 2014 .

[36]  Evangelia Demerouti,et al.  How dentists cope with their job demands and stay engaged: the moderating role of job resources. , 2005, European journal of oral sciences.

[37]  K. Jehn.  A Multimethod Examination of the Benefits and Detriments of Intragroup Conflict , 1995 .

[38]  Robert R. Blake,et al.  Solving costly organizational conflicts , 1984 .

[39]  M. Patterson,et al.  The role of weekly high‐activated positive mood, context, and personality in innovative work behavior: A multilevel and interactional model , 2014 .

[40]  Alexander Bakker,et al.  An Evidence-Based Model of Work Engagement , 2011 .

[41]  Eean R. Crawford,et al.  Linking job demands and resources to employee engagement and burnout: a theoretical extension and meta-analytic test. , 2010, The Journal of applied psychology.

[42]  A. Bakker,et al.  Empirical validation of the team work engagement construct , 2014 .

[43]  Guy Notelaers,et al.  Should I stay or should I go? Examining longitudinal relations among job resources and work engagement for stayers versus movers , 2008 .

[44]  D. Beal,et al.  An episodic process model of affective influences on performance. , 2005, The Journal of applied psychology.

[45]  Steve W. J. Kozlowski,et al.  The Dynamics of Emergence: Cognition and Cohesion in Work Teams , 2012 .

[46]  K. Jehn,et al.  The paradox of intragroup conflict: a meta-analysis. , 2012, The Journal of applied psychology.

[47]  Arnold B. Bakker,et al.  The Job Demands-Resources model: challenges for future research , 2011 .

[48]  S. Kozlowski,et al.  Multilevel Theory, Research, a n d M e t h o d s i n Organizations Foundations, Extensions, and New Directions , 2022 .

[49]  B. Fredrickson.  The role of positive emotions in positive psychology. The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. , 2001, The American psychologist.

[50]  E Doveh,et al.  Statistical properties of the rWG(J) index of agreement. , 2001, Psychological methods.

[51]  A. Bakker,et al.  The conceptualization and measurement of work engagement , 2010 .

[52]  Jeffrey T. Polzer,et al.  Finding Value in Diversity: Verification of Personal and Social Self-Views in Diverse Groups , 2004 .