Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between interpersonal conflict and construction project performance. The authors test the proposition that this relationship is mediated by negative emotions and moderated by political skill. Design/methodology/approach – This study used a structured questionnaire survey and gathered 266 completed data from 45 construction project teams in mainland China. To test the hypotheses, bootstrapping procedures were used. Findings – The results show that interpersonal conflict and negative emotions all have inverse relationships with project performance. Additionally, negative emotions mediated the relationship between interpersonal conflict and project performance, and this indirect relationship will be mitigated when team members have a high level of political skill. Research limitations/implications – These findings indicate that interpersonal conflict has a detrimental influence on project performance and should attract broad attention for future empirical literature. Furthermore, political skill is an effective contingent factor to suppress the detrimental influence of interpersonal conflict. Practical implications – The findings imply that managers should highlight the importance of interpersonal conflict in construction projects. Originality/value – This paper addresses a moderated mediation model to examine the relationship among interpersonal conflict, negative emotions and construction project performance, and it takes into account the moderating role of political skill. The paper also offers practical assistance to construction project managers in managing interpersonal conflict.

Relationship conflict is a pervasive phenomenon in cross-functional project teams. Although previous studies have demonstrated the dysfunctional effect of relationship conflict, the direct drivers of relationship conflict in cross-functional project teams remain unclear. To address this gap, a literature review and an advisory group discussion were performed to identify the antecedents of the relationship conflict framework. Afterward, a structural equation model (SEM) was used to confirm the influence of such antecedents on relationship conflict. Intrapersonal diversity, uncertain project task, organizational culture diversity, and inappropriate behavior positively influence relationship conflict. These findings help researchers better understand the drivers of relationship conflict as well as open a gateway for practitioners to control and manage relationship conflict for a successful cross-functional project.

Purpose This research aims to comprehensively investigate when and how cognitive conflict benefits team innovation in cross-functional project teams (CFPTs), by exploring the moderating role of knowledge leadership and dual mediation mechanisms of elaboration of task-related information/knowledge and affective conflict. Design/methodology/approach All hypotheses have been empirically tested by using structural equation model to analyze the quantitative data from a questionnaire survey covering 73 CFPTs in China. Findings Results indicate that knowledge leadership positively moderates the relationship between cognitive conflict and CFPT innovation. This moderating effect is directly or indirectly revealed by the dual mediating roles of task-related information/knowledge elaboration and affective conflict, which are two processes manifesting whether cognitive conflict can or cannot be incorporated into team innovation. Research limitations/implications Despite the external validity of results limited by convenient sampling method, the findings offer implications for promoting CFPT innovation. This can be achieved by developing competent knowledge leadership into team sensegiver, dissent reconciler and facilitator to accentuate benefits of cognitive conflict in information/knowledge elaboration and attenuate the likelihood of escalating to affective conflict. Originality/value This study advances the understanding of why cognitive conflict has an equivocal effect on team innovation in the context of CFPT by originally revealing how leaders’ role in information/knowledge management acts as a contingency and suggesting the dual mediating mechanisms that reflect the contingent impact. Project-based teams or organizations, characterized by cognitive clashes, can enhance innovation performance by shaping the meaningfulness of information/knowledge activities triggered by cognitive conflict.

Modeling reliability data with nonmonotone hazards is a prominent research topic that is quite rich and still growing rapidly. Many studies have suggested introducing new families of distributions to modify the Weibull distribution to model the nonmonotone hazards. In the present study, we propose a new family of distributions called a new lifetime exponential-X family. A special submodel of the proposed family called a new lifetime exponential-Weibull distribution suitable for modeling reliability data with bathtub-shaped hazard rates is discussed. The maximum-likelihood estimators of the model parameters are obtained. A brief Monte Carlo simulation study is conducted to evaluate the performance of these estimators. For illustrative purposes, two real applications from reliability engineering with bathtub-shaped hazard functions are analyzed. The practical applications show that the proposed model provides better fits than the other nonnested models.