Finding Teams that Fight Fair: Exploring Trajectories of Team Conflict Over Time

Disagreements are a reality for teams. Yet how and when teams experience conflict may impact their chances of success. We know relatively little about how team conflict emerges over time, especially for project-based teams. Disagreements over personal topics, logistics, and contributions have been consistently damaging to team performance (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003; O’Neill, Allen, & Hastings, 2013). The implications of task-based conflict over time, however, are inconsistent and poorly understood. To resolve these questions, I conducted three studies examining how conflict developed over the lifetimes of 272 engineering design project teams. Study 1 explored the measurement and patterns of dynamic team conflict. Conflict can be consistently measured over time; I found two classes of teams following different conflict trajectories. In Study 2, I examined whether personality and demographic traits influence team conflict over time and explored how conflict affects performance. Members’ demographic characteristics and personality traits related to their individual conflict perceptions. Accelerating relationship conflict predicted poorer team-rated performance, whereas extraversion and conscientiousness predicted better team-rated performance. In Study 3, I used faultlines to predict conflict paths and team performance. Teams with demographic faultlines saw relationship conflict increase more quickly over time. This in turn predicted lower performance. Personality faultlines had no relation to conflict or performance. Taken together, this set of studies uses new team input methods and finds that clusters of teams explain the conflict-success connection. These results help us understand conflict as it happens: from the moment teams work together to when they complete their projects