Exploring Co-Regulation in Teams: Strategies to Mitigate Conflict and Burnout

Abstract

Burnout is increasingly seen as a socially shaped phenomenon, with symptoms circulating among team members through interpersonal interactions and straining the team as a whole. However, we still know little about how collective and individual burnout experiences are constructed in socially stressful team environments and how teams can protect themselves from these effects. The present study integrates threat regulation and social allostatic load theories to investigate whether intra-team conflicts increase the prevalence of team burnout and, in turn, contribute to individual team members’ exhaustion. In addition, we hypothesized that team co-regulation strategies, defined as interpersonal processes (i.e., conflict management, emotion management, and confidence building), could alleviate the unfavorable effects of intra-team conflict on team burnout prevalence and subsequent individual exhaustion. We collected data from 357 employees working in 63 teams. The results of multilevel modeling analyses showed that intra-team conflict was positively related to team member exhaustion through burnout prevalence at the individual and team levels. As hypothesized, teams could effectively mitigate this process. Specifically, the results showed that when teams actively engaged in conflict management, emotion management, and confidence-building strategies, the indirect relationship between intra-team conflicts and individual exhaustion (explained by burnout prevalence) was significantly weakened at the team level. By contrast, the cross-level interaction effects were not significant. This study adds novel insights into how burnout prevalence shapes individual exhaustion responses to conflict, depending on the use of team co-regulation strategies. Moreover, our results inform targeted interventions to strengthen such strategies and promote both team functioning and well-being.