CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

1. CONFLICT IN THE WORKPLACE 25
Conflict and Performance
Perhaps the most obvious area for organizational scientists to look for
conflict’s consequences is the impact conflict has, or can have, on individual,
group, and organizational performance. Performance may be
operationalized in many different ways, such as the productivity relative
to one’s most salient competitor, as the supervisor’s evaluation of
her employees’ commitment, or as the quality of group decisions (e.g.,
Pritchard, 1992). Several scholars further argue that individual, group, and
organizational performance can be decomposed into task-related performance
and organizational citizenship behavior—compliance with collective
goals, taking initiatives, and coordinating activities. Organizational
citizenship behavior, sometimes referred to as extra-role or contextual
performance, involves behaviors of a discretionary nature that are not
part of the employee’s formal role requirements, but nevertheless promote
the effective functioning of the organization (Borman & Motowidlow,
1993; Organ, 1988; Podsakoff, Ahearne, & MacKenzie, 1997). Thus, first of
all, conflict may influence individual-level effectiveness—personal development
of skills, abilities, and knowledge, as well as the motivation to work
hard and to achieve one’s goals. In other words, conflict may impact taskrelated
performance because through conflict people learn new skills and
acquire new insights or because conflict undermines their motivation to
perform and contribute.
Second, conflict may influence interpersonal, or group-level effectiveness—learning
to work together, developing relationships, or reaching
high-quality group decisions. Group performance may be undermined
because conflict hurts efficient coordination or undermines the trust
needed to communicate effectively and to share task-relevant information
(De Dreu & Van Vianen, 2001). Conflict may increase group performance,
however, because it leads people to reevaluate their working assumptions,
to correct errors, and to approach decision problems from multiple perspectives
(see also Schulz-Hardt, Jochims, & Frey, 2002; Schulz-Hardt et
al., chapter 5, this volume). In particular, moderate compared with low
levels of sociocognitive, task-related conflict contribute to team effectiveness
(Jehn, 1995) and team innovation (De Dreu, 2006).
At the intergroup and organization level, conflict may influence performance
in a number of ways as well. Consider, for example, the field experiment by
Erev, Bornstein, and Galili (1993). They compared three conditions. In an
individual incentive condition, workers had to pick oranges and were paid
on the basis of their individual performance. In a team incentive condition,
workers had to pick oranges and were paid on the basis of their team’s
task performance. In an intergroup competition condition, workers were
paid on the basis of their team’s outperforming the competitor. Results
showed that the intergroup competition condition led to a higher task performance
than the team condition, with the individual incentive condition
being intermediate. The idea behind these findings is that resource-based