Individual Task Conflict Asymmetry and Peer Ratings of Member Effectiveness

Experiences of Individual Task Conflict Asymmetry

Experiencing more task conflict than fellow group members can have important negative consequences for the focal individual (Jehn et al., 2010; Jehn, Rupert, & Nauta, 2006). Individuals who experience more task conflict than their peers are likely to experience increased levels of negative affect. First, humans have a fundamental need for consistency and to believe that others share their perception of reality—experiencing more task conflict than peers creates an inconsistency in one’s social environment and induces threat (Van den Bos, 2009). In this respect, the similarity–attraction paradigm proposes that people feel more affinity toward others who hold similar beliefs (Byrne, 1971). Indeed, empirical evidence suggests that individuals with dissimilar beliefs like each other less, communicate less frequently, have less satisfying work relationships, and are more likely to leave (see Williams & O’Reilly, 1998). This makes partaking in a series of team interactions (e.g., team meetings, verbal and electronic conversations), yet being (made) aware that one’s teammates experience different realities inherently uncomfortable and anxiety provoking (Van den Bos, 2009). In contrast, being able to predict how others will interpret and react to new stimuli is comforting and reduces negative affect. Given that high conflict perceivers are most distal to their teammates, in the pessimistic direction, they should experience relatively more negative affect than moderate or low conflict perceivers.

Implicit in our argument is that low perceivers who are equally distant in conflict perceptions, but in the optimistic direction, are unlikely to be susceptible to the negative affect experienced by high perceivers. In support of this idea, research on conflict asymmetry has shown that low perceivers experience higher affective outcomes such as satisfaction (Jehn & Chatman, 2000; Jehn et al., 2010). Low perceivers may not pick up on information that others experience a heightened level of conflict. Research on conflict asymmetry has found that high perceivers use more conciliatory conflict resolution strategies (De Dreu, Kluwer, & Nauta, 2008) and are more motivated to present their arguments in a careful and politically sensitive manner (Sinha et al., 2016) because they recognize their lack of power. In a nonhierarchical team setting, high perceivers recognize that they do not have more or less power than others to affect change and will, thus, want to present any divergent opinions in a noncombative manner. As a result, any signal received by a low perceiver that others experience a high(er) level of conflict is likely to come through in a low intensity and ambiguous manner that may not make the other seem that different, and as such will not illuminate the asymmetry. Low perceivers, therefore, may not be able to perceive that high perceivers experience a different level of conflict and will, thus, not be affected by the threat that is provoked from dissimilar others.

Second, experiencing task conflict in general, and in asymmetrical configurations especially, can lead to negative affect (De Wit et al., 2012; Jehn et al., 2010). Research on the emotionality of conflict suggests that individuals can become dissatisfied when they interpret challenges to their viewpoints as challenges to their person. However, it is more often the norm than the exception for individuals to develop ownership of their argument and adopt their viewpoints as part of their extended selves (De Dreu & Van Knippenberg, 2005). This explains why task-related conflict often turns emotional (Yang & Mossholder, 2004), decreases satisfaction, is frustrating, and leads to turnover (Jehn, 1995; Jehn & Bendersky, 2003; Simons & Peterson, 2000). Being in an asymmetrical situation can make matters worse because low perceivers may not even pick up on their fellow teammates’ concerns. Therefore, in addition to feeling personally challenged, high perceivers may also feel belittled and disrespected (De Dreu et al., 2008; Jehn, De Wit, Barreto, & Rink, 2015; Simon & Sturmer, 2005). In support of this, research on romantic relationships has found that partners who perceive more conflict than their spouses are less satisfied in their relationship because of increased anxiety and distress about the future (Campbell, Simpson, Boldry, & Kashy, 2005).

In sum, most previous research has indicated that high conflict perceivers will experience negative consequences such as negative affect, lowered satisfaction, and absenteeism. In the present research, we propose that the downside of perceiving high task conflict—experiencing heightened negative affect—can paradoxically act as a catalyst that drives individual effectiveness (as rated by one’s peers). We use research on mood as input (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007) to predict that high conflict perceivers experience high uncertainty—defined as the lacking of precise knowledge about the likelihood of events (Hogarth, 1987)—in their teams. Being in a team in which one experiences significantly more conflict than others can create doubt about projected performance levels. In collective tasks, one way for individuals to decrease uncertainty regarding the ability to achieve a team goal is to contribute effort toward goal accomplishment. The social compensation theory of motivation (Williams & Karau, 1991) and social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) provide the framework for this argument. We further propose that individual effort will be noticed by one’s peers and translated into higher peer ratings of member effectiveness.

Individual Task Conflict Asymmetry, Individual Effectiveness, and Uncertainty

Mood-as-input theory proposes that individuals use their affective feelings as a basis for judgment (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007). We use this theory to explain why felt negative affect may trigger uncertainty about team performance and, in turn, propel high perceivers to be more effective. Moods inform the individual of whether everything is fine and can continue as they are, or whether attention and possible action are required. When members make evaluations about the valence of their team, they ask themselves “how do I feel about it” (Schwarz & Clore, 1983)? If the reply is negative, members are likely to attribute the cause of this reaction to the most salient goal of a work team—team performance. Felt negative affect can cast doubts on current team performance and signal to the high perceiver that current levels are not fine and that proactive effort is needed to right the course (Van Kleef, Homan, & Cheshin, 2012). Kooij-de Bode et al. (2010) found that participants who experienced high state negative affect engaged in deeper intragroup dialogue because of what such moods signaled to those individuals—that team performance may not be up to standards and that successful goal achievement is not certain.

This line of reasoning leads to the prediction that uncertainty should mediate the relationship between high conflict perception and individual effectiveness. Uncertainty is defined as not knowing the precise likelihood of events (Hogarth, 1987) and has been associated with the experience of negative affect (Gudykunst & Nishida, 2001). As we have argued, the negative affect experienced by high conflict perceivers is likely visualized in uncertainty about future team performance. This should, in turn, engender concern about how things will progress and whether the team can ultimately pull together to accomplish their task. Uncertainty is unpleasant when task accomplishment is important, and agentic actors should seek to reduce it as much as possible (Lipshitz & Strauss, 1997).

In a team setting, in which performance is the product of collective effort, one way to reduce uncertainty is to put forth more individual effort toward goal achievement. Social compensation (Williams & Karau, 1991) occurs when two conditions are met—when a team member believes that current performance levels are insufficient to meet team goals and when the collective product is meaningful to that member. Under these conditions, the member will be motivated to work harder. On a collective task, this implies that expectations about teammates’ input level should influence one’s own effectiveness. High task conflict perceivers, because of their uncertainty with current performance levels, should be motivated to expand effort to increase the probability of achieving high team performance. Conversely, when individuals are not uncertain, they should be more confident in their teammates and perceive a lower correlation between individual effort and high performance, which would not trigger an increase in individual effectiveness.

The second necessary condition for social compensation to occur, and an assumption of our current model, is that members find the rewards of success meaningful. Although this may not be the case in all teams, we propose that in many academic (and organizational) settings, the consequences of high performance are quite substantial. These can include material benefits (e.g., salary, bonus), status (e.g., promotion, awards, honors), resources for the future (e.g., high grades, recommendations), and positive affect (e.g., self-validation). We would argue that most team members find one or multiple of these outcomes to be desirable. Consistent with these ideas, Williams and Karau (1991) found that on a collective task, when members expected their teammates to perform poorly, they were willing to work harder to compensate for their teammate provided that the outcomes were valuable.

In addition, research on social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1986) would also predict that when uncertainty is high, members should be willing to work harder. One aspect of this theory is that individuals garner positive self-evaluation through membership in high-status teams. Teams can achieve high status by performing well (Ellemers, De Gilder, & Haslam, 2004). Individuals who are uncertain about the performance of their team should, thus, be motivated to contribute effort as a way to elevate the status of their team (Ellemers et al., 2004). Consistent with the notion that individuals care about the evaluation of their team, Harkins and Szymanski (1989) found that members were less likely to free ride when they believed that their team’s performance would be compared with other teams.

We contend that individual effort will be noticed by peers and translated into higher peer ratings of effectiveness. In situations with high outcome interdependence, such as in a team setting, members should be highly vigilant about who is contributing what. We thus propose the following:

Participants and Design

A total of 247 MBA students in 76 teams from a large Australian university participated as a part of their course. Team size ranged from three to four (49 three-person teams, 25 four-person teams). The demographic breakdown is as follows: 71% of participants were male, the average age was 31 years (SD = 4.87 years), 55% were Caucasian, 26% were Asian, and 11% were Black. Participants had an average of 5.2 years of previous work experience (SD = 3.97 years).

The students worked together for the duration of the semester to complete a team project that comprised 45% of students’ grade. The project required team members to develop their negotiation skills by writing an in-depth memo on the topic of negotiation. Teams had a large amount of autonomy on how to approach the project, and could choose to analyze a past negotiation situation, conduct interviews with a negotiation expert, or develop a new negotiation exercise. Because of the open nature of the project, teams had to make sense of a complex environment, converge on a strategy, and execute that strategy.

Surveys were administered at three time points: Demographic data and individual competitive orientation were measured at the beginning, conflict perceptions were measured at the midpoint, and round-robin peer ratings of member effectiveness were measured at the end of the course when all assignments were turned in but prior to receiving course grades.

Measures

Participants and Design

A total of 106 undergraduate students in 21 teams from a midsized university in the United States participated as a part of their course. Team size ranged from three to six (one three-person team, 17 five-person teams, three six-person teams). The demographic breakdown is as follows: 56% of participants were male, the average age was 19.83 years (SD = 1.76 years), 49% were Asian, 42% were Caucasian, and 7% were Black.

Students worked together for the duration of the semester to complete a team project that comprised 25% of their grade. The project required team members to choose an organization and create a plan of action for a problem that the organization is facing (e.g., motivation issues, retention, conflict, culture). Students were asked to write an in-depth memo on their organization. They had to focus on a problem that the organization was currently facing or on a new directive that the organization wanted to undertake, provide an analysis of root causes or impactful leverage points, and a feasible plan of action for how the organization should move forward. Teams had a large amount of autonomy on how to approach the project, how to collect data (i.e., interviews, surveys, archival information), and which course concepts to focus on. Similar to the project in Study 1, teams had to make sense of a complex environment, converge on a strategy, and execute that strategy.

We administered surveys at four time points: Demographic data were measured at the beginning, conflict perceptions were measured at the midpoint, uncertainty was measured between the midpoint and the end of the course, and round-robin peer ratings of member effectiveness were measured at the end of the course when all assignments were turned in but prior to receiving course grades.

Measures

Limitations and Future Directions

There are some limitations in the current research that should be kept in mind when interpreting results. First, the use of student teams may raise questions of generalizability to an organizational setting. Organizational teams may have some inherent characteristics that make them different from student teams such as the expectation of continued employment and a less restricted tenure and age range. However, we believe that the presence of real consequences (e.g., grades) and external pressures (e.g., reputation, competitive culture) makes student teams an adequate parallel to organizational work teams. In addition, we found the same results across two studies that sampled vastly different types of students (e.g., undergraduates vs. graduates, American university vs. Australian university), which provides some assurance to the robustness of our findings. Future research, however, would benefit from replicating these results in an organizational setting and across different organizational fields that may exhibit different work dynamics.

Even though previous research has illustrated that uncertainty and negative affect often go hand in hand (Gudykunst & Nishida, 2001; Thomsen, 2006), our data only speak to the mediating role of uncertainty. Unfortunately, we did not directly measure negative affect. Capturing negative affect and linking it directly to uncertainty would provide even more evidence for our core theory. Fortunately, there are well-established findings in the conflict literature that experiencing high task conflict is unpleasant and threatening (for a review, see De Wit et al., 2012). Furthermore, mood-as-input research (Clore & Huntsinger, 2007) suggests that individuals make attributions about the current state of affairs (i.e., performance level) based on their affective reactions. Therefore, our argument that individual conflict asymmetry increases negative affect, which, in turn, creates uncertainty regarding the adequacy of current team performance, exists within the context of well-established theory and empirical evidence. However, proof of this relationship would provide additional support for our arguments and future research could take a more fine-grained approach, and directly measures negative affect as well as uncertainty.

Relatedly, our measure of uncertainty was broad. Prior conceptualization of team processes has made the distinction between task-based and team-based orientations (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993). Admittedly, the items measuring uncertainty were worded as more team based. We chose this measure because in student work teams who come together for the duration of the semester, the main goal is task accomplishment (as opposed to social groups or longer term work teams who may additionally be concerned about relational dynamics). As such, asking uncertainty toward the team should trigger a mind-set regarding uncertainty toward the task as that is the most salient aspect of such teams (Bakker, 2010). Of course, future research should generate items that are more focused on uncertainty regarding the task and examine whether the effects proposed in this research can be replicated.

Although we controlled for potentially omitted variables that may be correlated with both perception of task conflict and performance (Study 1: competitive orientation, Study 2: determination), we cannot fully rule out the possibility of other omitted variables. For instance, a fundamental component of Salovey and Mayer’s (1990) model of emotional intelligence (EI) is the ability to perceive emotions. It is possible that individuals high on EI are both adept at recognizing the presence of task conflict and effective team members, as prior research has found a link between EI and managing interpersonal dynamics (Farh, Seo, & Tesluk, 2012). Future research should take a two-pronged approach along this line. First, research on individual conflict asymmetry may benefit from examining antecedents of conflict perceptions. Notable research in this area has found that beliefs, culture, and structural position can determine conflict experiences (Avgar & Neuman, 2015; Gelfand et al., 2001). Future research may also want to examine individual difference variables that are related to emotional capabilities, task performance, or both, such as EI, personality, intelligence, and leader disposition. Researchers can also examine structural antecedents such as team hierarchy, organizational policies, and firm demographics. Second, future models that consider the link between conflict perceptions and performance should control for variables that are related to both the independent and dependent variables. The model in the present research would also be strengthened by future replications that control for those variables, beyond competitive orientation and determination.

As mentioned previously, we focused on peer ratings of member effectiveness for a number of theoretical and empirical reasons. However, despite the advantages of using peer ratings, there are also some disadvantages. Critics of peer ratings have pointed out that they can be susceptible to biasing rater–ratee relationship factors that are unrelated to task competencies, such as friendship or in-group membership (Borman et al., 1995). For instance, research on social categorization (Williams & O’Reilly, 1998) has found that in-group members like each other more. Although there is no way to parse out whether or how much such biasing effects influenced members’ ratings of each other, there are a number of reasons we believe these effects were minimized in the current research. First, research using the similarity–attraction model has found that when members of equal status work toward a common goal, categorization of members into an us-versus-them camp decreases (Tajfel & Turner, 1986). In addition, as time progresses, members are more likely to base liking on deep-level instead of surface-level characteristics (Harrison, Price, & Bell, 1998). Therefore, it is possible that any effects of liking on peer ratings of effectiveness are actually mediated by task-relevant characteristics such as how hardworking or trustworthy a teammate is. Nonetheless, future research would benefit from taking a multisource approach and examine whether and how the proposed relationships are affected by different rater sources.

Our current research also raises a number of interesting questions for future research. For instance, our findings suggest that although high perceivers are seen as more effective team members, the mechanism through which this happens—feeling uncertain—can be unpleasant and anxiety inducing. This perspective begs the question of how sustainable this heightened performance is over the long run. Presumably, constantly second guessing one’s teammates and having to compensate for their lack of accountability would violate norms of equity (Carrell & Dittrich, 1978). Furthermore, taking an emotional contagion lens (Barsade, 2002), is it possible that in long-standing teams, high perceivers eventually “catch” the less negative affective tone of low perceivers? And, would this mitigate high perceivers’ effectiveness? A fruitful area for future research may be to examine the downstream effects of individual conflict asymmetry. For instance, on the negative side, do high perceivers report less satisfaction and intention to stay? On the positive side, is it possible that, over time, high perceivers garner recognition for their contribution and are more likely to be promoted in their organizations? Or, as would be suggested by the emotional contagion literature, do members adjust toward a common affective tone, diminishing the effects of individual task conflict asymmetry?

Another area for future research is to examine the role of task meaningfulness in predicting our model. Implicit in our arguments is that high conflict perceivers found the task meaningful enough on some dimension (e.g., learning, grade, reputation, self-esteem) to care about the outcome, thus driving the positive relationship between uncertainty and effectiveness. If the team product is meaningless to the high conflict perceiver, this member will not be very motivated to increase effectiveness even if he or she is uncertain about team outcomes because high performance will not lead to any valued rewards (Williams & Karau, 1991). In the current research, we believe that because of the competitiveness of the universities sampled, students mostly cared about high performance. This meant that we mainly sampled participants who perceived the task to be highly important. Future research should consider examining the role of task meaningfulness as a moderator to our proposed model and compare the effects of individual conflict asymmetry on outcomes in situations with high and low outcome importance.