CHAPTER 19
Discussion and Analysis
The main contribution of this study is that it provides empirical support that cognitive conflict can spiral into affective conflict during decision-making. Specifically, cognitive conflict served as a significant mediator between affective conflict and team, task, and organizational determinants.
Our findings are important because they shed light on why cognitive and affective conflict are so closely related. Past researchers have explained that cognitive and affective conflict are likely to co-occur because the factors that promote cognitive conflict also promote affective conflict (and vice-versa) (Amason and Sapienza 1997; Jehn, 1994). Indeed, researchers have included cognitive and affective conflict as separate dependent variables and have found that various team, task, and organizational determinants have similar main effects on both cognitive and affective conflict. Our findings suggest that this research might be missing an important theoretical link. That is, if cognitive conflict was taken into account as a mediator, the main effects observed for affective conflict may have weakened or even disappeared altogether.
In other words, our findings suggest that affective conflict emerges in large part based on the level of cognitive conflict teams’ experience, a fact that has been largely ignored in studies of conflict. Thus, if we are to understand how cognitive conflict can be promoted and affective conflict avoided, we need to direct our attention to the mutation between cognitive and affective conflict.
In particular, our results show that the cognitive conflict that was promoted by larger teams, goal uncertainty, and team-based rewards mutated into affective conflict. When teams are larger, more cognitive diversity is likely to exist among team members, making cognitive conflict more likely. The problem is that when teams are larger, team members may have less of an opportunity to fully express their views during team discussions. Moreover, members of large teams may be less able than they would be on smaller teams to get to know one another. These factors seem to make members of larger teams more inclined to take task-related perspectives personally, making affective conflict more likely.
The findings with regard to goal uncertainty and team-based rewards underscore that when goals are less defined on a project and organizations reward individuals based on their performance in teams, team members are encouraged to critically examine issues and explore and debate alternatives. However, as with larger teams, our results show that this cognitive conflict is likely to trigger affective conflict. Perhaps when goals are less defined, there is more to debate and team members might misinterpret task-related perspectives as attempts by team members to set goals that are more personally motivated. Moreover, with team-based rewards, team members are so encouraged to perform well in teams that the pressure might make team members more sensitive and aware of their team members, making affective conflict more likely to occur.
The implications of these results, however, cannot be to simply minimize team membership, clarify goals more precisely, and eliminate team-based rewards, because in so doing, teams would not gain the benefits of cognitive conflict. Rather, our results underscore the importance of better understanding the mechanisms through which affective conflict emerges from cognitive conflict.
In this regard, our results support Simons and Peterson’s (2000) findings that trust moderates the relationship between cognitive and affective conflict such that under conditions of high trust, cognitive conflict is less likely to spiral into affective conflict. We also found that behavioral integration moderates cognitive and affective conflict in a similar manner: teams that exhibit high behavioral integration are more likely to experience cognitive conflict without triggering affective conflict. These findings might be explained by the fact that with high trust and strong behavioral integration norms, team members are more inclined to listen to and objectively consider the diverse perspectives of their teammates rather than second-guessing those perspectives as not being task-oriented. Although they are distinct concepts, trust and behavioral integration have similar effects on interactions among team members. When teams exhibit high behavioral integration, they are mutually responsible and accountable for decisions (Hambrick 1994). As a result, team members are more inclined to trust their teammates because their interests are aligned.
Finally, it is worth noting that cognitive conflict did not mediate all factors we explored. Specifically, two of our team factors—functional membership diversity and member turnover—related positively to cognitive conflict, but the cognitive conflict but was not related to the affective conflict experience by the team. These findings are consistent with a study by Pelled et al. (1999) that found that functional background diversity to have a positive relationship with cognitive conflict and no relationship with affective conflict. When team members come from different functional areas, they are likely to share diverse perspectives over the tasks to be performed. Our results and those of Pelled et al. (1999) suggest, however, that this diversity is unlikely to stimulate more emotional, affective debate. Thus, it appears that creating cross-functional teams, as researchers have long suspected, does benefit team functioning (for example, Jackson, 1996), particularly in their abilities to manage conflict effectively.
The results that team member turnover relates positively to cognitive conflict but not to affective conflict may also shed light on conflict management. When team membership changes, new team members bring fresh ideas about how to perform team tasks (George and Bettenhausen 1990). The team may also be encouraged to reevaluate the way tasks are delegated and managed (Goodman and Leyden 1991). Surprisingly, we did not find that this triggered more affective debate. Instead, it seems that on average, project teams are able to manage such challenges and derive the benefits of cognitive conflict without the costs of affective conflict.
Study Limitations
Though the study offers several new insights into our understanding of conflict management in project teams, limitations of the current study should be noted. First, the number of variables included in our theoretical model is somewhat large relative to the size of the research sample. While we found support for several of our hypotheses, we failed to find support for others. It may be that, due to a lack of statistical power, we failed to detect a difference when indeed one may exist.
Finally, data for this study were collected at a single point in time. This is important to note when interpreting the mediation results. Since cognitive conflict and affective conflict were measured at the same time, we have no way of confirming that affective conflict does indeed stem from cognitive conflict taken personally. The problem is that even with longitudinal data, such a mutation would be hard to observe as the transition from cognitive to affective conflict can be instantaneous. Especially given that theoretical support exists for the tendency of cognitive conflict to spiral into affective conflict (Amason and Sapienza 1997; Jehn 1994; Simons and Peterson 2000), we believe our results suggest such a relationship.
Conclusion and Directions for Future Research
In an effort to shed light on how teams can manage conflict effectively, past researchers have unsuccessfully sought to identify factors that relate positively to cognitive conflict but negatively to affective conflict. This approach largely ignores that, while they are distinct concepts, the level of cognitive conflict might relate directly to the level of affective conflict experienced by the team.
This paper provides support that affective conflict occurs in large part based on the level of cognitive conflict experienced by the team. When teams engage in cognitive debate, those debates can become personally and emotionally charged, which, in turn, triggers affective conflict. In other words, team members take cognitive debates personally. Past researchers have suspected cognitive conflict could spiral into affective conflict (Amason and Sapienza 1997), but this is the first study we are aware of that considers cognitive conflict as a mediator of affective conflict and antecedent conditions.
These findings have important implications for studies of conflict because it suggests that to understand how to manage conflict effectively, we need a better understanding of the mechanisms through which this mutation from cognitive to affective conflict occurs. Our findings show that when seeking to manage conflict, teams should first ensure that team members trust one another and that team members exhibit strong behavioral integration. Under these conditions, the cognitive conflict the teams experience will be less likely to trigger affective conflict.
We encourage researchers to identify other conditions in addition to trust and behavioral integration that help avoid the mutation from cognitive to affective conflict. We also encourage researchers to explore trust and behavioral integration more extensively, including the ways in which they can be promoted in teams. In this regard, we suspect that a potential difficulty for teams is that some of the factors that promote trust and behavioral integration (for example, team homogeneity) might discourage cognitive conflict. Thus, when trust is promoted, cognitive conflict is less likely to spark affective conflict but cognitive conflict may be unlikely to occur in the first place. The challenge is to identify conditions that promote cognitive conflict that, at the same time, make cognitive conflict less likely to trigger affective conflict.