Antecedents of perceived dyadic conflict: a multilevel perspective
Past conflict research on teams provides a wealth of conceptual and empirical insight into various aspects of conflict (e.g., when and how different types of conflict affect individual, team, and organizational outcomes). Nevertheless, conflict research thus far has been limited in two key respects. First, we know little about what drives conflict. There has been relatively little empirical research that investigates antecedents of conflict though they have been acknowledged as important. Second, conflict in organizations at the dyad-level has also received insufficient academic attention until recently. In organizational behavior research, conflict is usually conceptualized as a collective experience shared by all team members, and measured accordingly, allowing individual responses to be aggregated to a team level. However, in many cases conflict occurs between two people, and these interpersonal relationships are often not captured in the traditional psychometric approach. To address these limitations, this dissertation focuses on perceived dyadic conflict—individuals’ specific conflict experiences within a team. It also proposes a multi-level model of antecedents of dyadic conflict. Specifically, I argue that understanding perceived dyadic conflict is fundamental to understanding intragroup conflict, based on the observation that all group conflict can be broken down into dyadic interactions among fellow team members. I also argue that dyadic conflict is a function of individual, dyad, and team factors. I developed a study framework for understanding perceived dyadic conflict that considers individuals’ personalities, the extent to which they communicate about work matters and socialize with other team members, and their teams’ levels of psychological safety. The data for this dissertation were collected at a multidisciplinary state research institution located in the Midwest as part of a larger project. These data provide a unique opportunity to examine perceived dyadic conflict in a team setting. Results of the data analysis provide evidence for the claim that individuals’ perceptions of conflict with a fellow team members are affected by individual, interpersonal, and contextual factors. Individuals high in agreeableness are less likely to perceive and experience both task and relationship conflict in dyadic relationships, while individuals high in conscientiousness are more likely to experience both dyadic task and dyadic relationship conflict. Similarly, individuals high in extraversion are more likely to perceive and experience dyadic conflict (for both task and relationship conflict). Interestingly, individuals high in neuroticism are more likely to perceive dyadic task conflict unlike my expectation. Moreover, dyads perceive and experience more dyadic task conflict when two dyad members differ in extraversion. Dyads that have work-related communication report more dyadic task conflict. Teams’ psychological safety climate was found to be a driving factor that increases team members’ perceptions of task conflict in dyadic relationships. This dissertation contributes to conflict and conflict management research by providing empirical evidence about where dyadic conflict comes from by examining antecedents at different levels. This dissertation also breaks down intragroup conflict at the lower-level, dyad-level, where it originates. By doing so, this dissertation provides an explicit understanding of who has dyadic conflicts with whom within a team using dyadic approach and what affects the dyadic conflict to unpack intragroup conflict.
Dyadic conflict, Antecedents, Multilevel
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign