Recognizing the Individual Psychological Experience of Conflict in Team Conflict

Abstract: Conflict often occurs within groups. Recent theoretical and empirical research has begun to examine diverse experiences of conflict and identify individual sense-making processes as a fundamental component to understanding intragroup conflict. We integrate and build on this work by developing a model of the impact the psychological experience of conflict has on individual and group conflict outcomes. We describe two key processes of the psychological experience—(1) initial conflict construal (i.e., how group members initially perceive and plan to engage with a conflict) and (2) real-time conflict sense-making (i.e., the process through which an individual develops understanding of what is occurring and why it is occurring). We describe how these processes affect individual emergent states, including interpersonal attitudes, learning/information acquisition, and the updating of conflict construals, and the resultant conflict behavior, as well the implications of understanding the psychological experience of a conflict episode for group outcomes.

Keywords: Group conflict, construal, sense-making

Topic: TEAM   |   Format: Extended Abstract