Rising to the Top: Motivational Forces Influencing Status Conflict in Sourcing Teams

Abstract

Organizations often use cross-functional teams to make key Operations and Supply Chain Management decisions, but doing so risks instigating conflict between team members since cross-functional delegates often have opposing functional goals. While previous work has explored the effect of functional goals (i.e., external motivation) in cross-functional team performance, we extend research in this area to incorporate individual team members' psychological needs (i.e., internal motivation). Specifically, we consider how the interplay of these motivational mechanisms can lead to status conflict within the team, and the ensuing implications on team performance. We conduct an experiment of 136 ad hoc team-based sourcing decisions, complemented with a sequential qualitative study involving interviews with 37 practicing managers. The results show that functional goal misalignment leads to status conflict, as expected. Yet, counterintuitively, this effect can be mitigated with the team's composition in individual psychological needs for dominance, specifically with heterogeneously dominant individuals. Our study contributes to the behavioral operations management literature on sourcing teams and to the team motivation literature. We provide guidance on how managers can compose cross-functional teams to improve decision outcomes considering the interplay of external and internal motivational mechanisms.