CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

7. WORKPLACE AGGRESSION AND CONFLICT 231
acts of revenge (Bies et al., 1997), and aggressive exchanges are relationship
conflicts by definition. By paying greater attention to the perceived
motives behind conflicts (based upon targets’ attributions), it may be possible
to gain a clearer picture of the conditions under which task conflict
will lead to positive outcomes.
Workplace Aggression at Higher Levels of Analysis
Despite the conflict literature’s strong emphasis on group or team contexts,
research on workplace aggression in groups is only beginning to
emerge. The evidence thus far reveals that group contexts influence individuals’
levels of aggression enacted and that they also make the negative
effects of experiencing aggression even more detrimental. With regard
to enacting aggression, individuals’ levels of aggression are influenced
by the levels enacted by group members (Robinson & O’Leary-Kelly,
1998), even after controlling for individual differences known to influence
aggression (Glomb & Liao, 2003). With regard to experiences of aggression,
research on sexual harassment, a type of aggressive behavior at work
(e.g., Barling et al., 2001; Neuman & Baron, 1996; O’Leary-Kelly, Paetzold,
& Griffin, 2000), explored individual and group outcomes. Glomb et al.
(1997) argued that sexual harassment is an organizational stressor that
may be either discretionary (e.g., transmitted to individuals differentially)
or ambient (e.g., pervade a group and be potentially available to all group
members; Hackman, 1992). They introduced the construct ambient sexual
harassment (ASH), a group-level phenomenon reflecting the general or
ambient level of sexual harassment in a work group, and they demonstrated
that ASH predicts negative personal outcomes for group members,
even after controlling for individual experiences of harassment. Raver
and Gelfand (2005) demonstrated that ASH was associated with teamlevel
outcomes including high levels of conflict, low levels of cohesion,
and poor team financial performance. They also provided a multilevel
theoretical model, which outlined several group- and organizational-level
antecedents, processes, and consequences of ASH.
Based upon this evidence on how interdependent work contexts influence
the levels and outcomes of aggression, future research must continue
to investigate the nature and outcomes of workplace aggression within
dyads and larger groups (e.g., units and organizations). In doing so, one
important question is how aggression emerges as a construct that characterizes
the group as a whole. Future research should explore the ambient
and shared nature of workplace aggression and the mechanisms through
which information about aggression is communicated, understood, and
observed in work groups. Consistent with Raver and Gelfand’s (2005)
model, research is also needed to explore the group- and organizationallevel
performance outcomes associated with experiences of workplace
aggression, as well as cross-level relationships and moderators.