"Heating Up and Cooling Down: Relationship Conflict, Emotion Regulation, and Team Processes"

Abstract

Conceptualizing relationship conflict as a threat to team members, we examined the relationship between relationship conflict and change in critical team processes in thirty-five project teams over a 4-month period. The purpose of our investigation was to test composite team emotion regulation (i.e. cognitive reappraisal vs. suppression) as a moderator of the change in these team processes over time. Using conditional linear growth modeling to test our hypotheses, we found that teams with high initial levels of relationship conflict experience worse interpersonal functioning and coordinate less initially, and continue to demonstrate low levels of these processes over their lifespan. However, the findings showed that this longitudinal pattern is disrupted where teams are higher on collective cognitive reappraisal. Indeed, over time the teams we surveyed that were more likely to reappraise negative events overcame negative process patterns caused by relationship conflict. Some implications of these findings, and directions for future research are discussed.