The vicious cycle of unfairness and conflict in teams

Abstract

Purpose Teams often cannot fulfill their managers’ expectations due to unfairness issues and dysfunctional conflicts with teammates. This paper aims to create a fair team environment, it is important to analyze the interrelationship between unfairness and conflict. However, only a few studies have done this and reported inconsistent results. Using negative reciprocity research as a theoretical foundation, this paper analyzes the interconnection between unfairness and conflict dimensions in the team context. This paper further integrates conflict management research to show employees and managers how to handle unfairness and conflict in teams. Design/methodology/approach The authors conducted a longitudinal survey study (three points in time) with 237 employees from different German organizations. Findings The results of cross-lagged structural equation modeling provide some evidence that interpersonal, procedural and informational unfairness predict relationship conflict and process conflict. Several of these effects become non-significant over time. Further, relationship and process conflict have several significant relationships with the unfairness dimensions, while task conflict did not have any significant relationship. The results also suggest that employees can break up the vicious cycle of unfairness and conflict by using a cooperative conflict management approach. Research limitations/implications This paper focuses on members of autonomous, interdependent and existing teams and the interpersonal relationship of a team member with her or his teammates. Future research could analyze leader-member relationships in different team types. Practical implications The application of cooperative conflict management enables employees to break up the vicious cycle of unfairness. Originality/value This paper clarifies the interrelationship between unfairness and conflict and shows that a team member can apply a cooperative conflict management style to handle effectively unfairness and conflict.

No news, no excitement, no creativity: Moderating roles of adaptive humour and proactivity

“…Unfair organizational information provision might take different forms—as mirrored in the operationalization of this construct in the empirical part of the study—such as when organizational authorities deprive employees of complete work‐related information, maintain inadequate communication practices, fail to explain work procedures in detail or do not adjust their communication to employees' specific needs (Colquitt, 2001). This conceptualization aligns with existing definitions of informational justice as ‘the extent to which managers provide adequate justification and sufficient information’ (Shin et al, 2015: p. 506) or parallel definitions of informational injustice as the ‘perceived unfairness of explanations and communication’ (Adamovic, 2021: p. 128). Notably, most creativity research that investigates organizational fairness adopts a positive angle, highlighting the beneficial roles of fair employee treatment for spurring creative work behaviours (Gupta & Singh, 2015; Kim et al, 2017).…”

Taking a conflict perspective to explain an employee’s creativity

“…Task conflict with teammates and cooperation with teammates One of the most popular frameworks in the workplace conflict literature is Jehn's (1995Jehn's ( , 1997 classification in task conflict, process conflict and relationship conflict. In this paper, we focus on task conflict because of its potential relevance for creativity (Farh et al, 2010;Hu, Chen, Gu, Huang and Liu, 2017;Jehn et al, 2010) and because relationship and process conflict usually have dysfunctional effects on employee outcomes (Adamovic, 2021;Adamovic et al, 2020;De Wit et al, 2012;Olsen et al, 2021). Regarding task conflict, some conflict scholars argue that task conflict has beneficial effects on creativity and innovation (Jehn, 1997;Mitchell et al, 2019).…”

“…Demonstrating respect and dignity toward teammates during a task conflict also creates the basis for participative decision-making processes (Adamovic, 2021). An individual employee, who applies a cooperative conflict management, gives teammates the possibility to expresses their perspectives during a task conflict and listens carefully to their statements (Tjosvold et al, 2010(Tjosvold et al, , 2014.…”

“…Our approach is in line with meta-analyses about conflict effects (De Wit et al , 2012; O'Neill et al , 2013) that have shown that it is important to consider moderators that explain when task conflict has beneficial versus dysfunctional effects. According to conflict management scholars, it is not enough to describe the type or degree of conflict; the management of the conflict is decisive to benefit from the potential of conflict in terms of exchanging information and knowledge (Adamovic, 2021; Al-Ghazali and Afsar, 2021). Tjosvold (1998) as well as most prior research distinguishes between two conflict management styles: cooperative conflict management; and competitive conflict management …”

“…Workplace conflict research includes not only conflict type research but also conflict management style research (Einarsen et al , 2018; Tjosvold, 2008). Surprisingly, both conflict research streams have proceeded independently from each other (Adamovic, 2021; DeChurch et al , 2013; Maltarich et al , 2018; Rispens et al , 2021). In this article, we address this gap and integrate both research streams.…”