Workgroups have become one of the most ubiquitous elements of 21st-century organizations—from project teams to boardrooms.
They are the units in which the work of the organization—planning, design, development, operations, production, distribution, sales, service delivery, human resources, and so on—is done.
Conflict in workgroups is of interest both in its positive and negative aspects. The negative aspect of conflict in workgroups is the disruption it causes, which has the potential to break down workgroups, reduce performance, and make members dissatisfied and unhappy. This must be weighed against the positive aspects of conflict, the new ideas and procedures it often introduces or sparks, the stronger workgroup and increased trust and capabilities that result from successfully navigating a difficult conflict, and the increased participation and voice that wellmanaged conflicts afford members.When we reviewed the literature that examines workgroup conflict for the first edition of this Handbook (Poole & Garner, 2006), we sorted research into instrumental, developmental, and political perspectives. We were struck by the divisions between these broad perspectives despite the potential benefits of integration. In examining research conducted since that edition, much has changed even while much has remained the same. A great deal of research remains isolated from other positions. However, some scholars have advanced ideas that hold potential for bridging perspectives, most commonly the instrumental and developmental perspectives. Additionally, interdisciplinary journals, such as Management Communication Quarterly, and most notably Small Group Research, have led the way in tearing down disciplinary sectarianism. The research over the past 7 years has also added a new area of interest— network research on workgroup conflict—and drawn more attention to virtual teams (VT), which seemed to be a dawning area in the first edition. The chapter for this edition begins by defining workgroup conflict and briefly introducing each of the three perspectives in workgroup conflict research.
The chapter then examines research in each perspective. Although much of the research in the last edition is also included here, we draw particular emphasis to more recent scholarship and the areas in which that scholarship has focused. Finally, we discuss efforts to integrate these perspectives, integrations that we see as particularly fruitful for future research.Defining Workgroups
A workgroup is a set of three or more people who carry out common tasks in an organization. This definition highlights several important features of workgroups that we briefly discuss here by way of introduction.
Workgroups vary considerably in terms of size. Although 3 is the minimum size considered to be a group in this review, typical sizes of workgroups vary widely: Amason (1996) reported an average size of about 6 in his sample; Lovelace, Shapiro, and Weingart (2001) and Kirkman, Rosen, Tesluk, and Gibson (2004) averaged 10; Panteli’s (2004) virtual teams (VTs) averaged 25; and one VT studied by Ngwenyama (1998) had 79 members.
Members of workgroups use a number of different communication channels. Most research has focused on groups that interact primarily face-to-face. A number of recent studies, however, have focused on VTs that interact via phone, e-mail, instant messaging, text and video conferencing, and various other types of specialized groupware. Members of VTs are typically dispersed across different locations, with subgroups of members colocated. The dynamics of conflict in VTs are somewhat different from those in colocated teams that meet mostly face-to-face.
Workgroups differ in significant ways from the experimental groups commonly studied in conflict research. Members of workgroups are more likely to have vested interests in the group than are members of lab groups. Workgroups originate as an outgrowth of organizational needs, and their raison d’etre is grounded in consequential work and significant purpose, while laboratory groups are artificial constructions of the researcher.
Many workgroups have considerable history and traditions, while most laboratory groups have no or limited history. Finally, members of most workgroups have an expectation of future interaction and experience real consequences from their behavior in the group, while members of most laboratory groups know that their time in their group is limited (even if they are not sure when the group will terminate) and that most consequences of their behavior will not stay with them once they leave the lab. Many of these distinctions are captured by the bona fide group perspective (Putnam & Stohl, 1990). For these reasons, research on workgroup conflict enables us to make judgments regarding the extent to which experimental findings hold in the “real world” and suggests important new questions to be explored in more controlled environments.Based on the definition above, this review focuses on studies of actual workgroups situated in private and public organizations. Research using student groups is considered only in limited ways in so far as this literature may or may not apply to workgroups.