Team conflict dynamics: A multi-level longitudinal view of conflict for team performance

Scholars have devoted considerable attention to the study of conflict in teams, demonstrating inconsistent insight. A potential innovation to this literature is to reconceptualize relationship conflict as a relational construct representing the disagreement between two team members. We build upon this idea to develop a longitudinal model of intrateam conflict development, placing dyadic relationships in a central position in regards to the organizing processes within teams. Across two studies (a one- shot lab study of 108 teams and an eight time period longitudinal study of 24 teams), we demonstrate that relationship conflict suppresses information exchange in teams, while information exchange leads to team task conflict. Moreover, we find that task conflict level interacts with task conflict asymmetry to influence performance. The results of our study demonstrate that relationship and task conflict can and do exist as separable constructs, given enough time and the opportunity to develop mutual understan...