manager's job

Igniting and resolving content disagreements during team interactions: A statistical discourse analysis of team dynamics at work.

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   Disagreements are integral to fruitful team collaboration but have rarely been

 

studied within actual team interactions. We develop a temporal account of how

 

disagreement episodes begin and are resolved during team interactions at work.

 

Discourse analysis of 32,448 turns of talk by 259 employees during 43 team

 

meetings revealed that problem solving behaviors ignited content disagreements.

 

Disagreements can help teams create better solutions through integrating

 

divergent perspectives and sparking new ideas. Content disagreement can be

 

crucial for superior team problem-solving and decision making. As content

 

disagreements can display and integrate different perspectives, they can help

 

team members learn about one another's views. We examine disagreements as

 

they unfold in real time rather than relying on aggregations of such behaviors or

 

post hoc self‐reports. We use quantitative methodology and statistical modeling

 

to test our hypotheses.

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   Disagreements within teams are not isolated occurrences. Instead, each

 

disagreement begins and ends within social and temporal contexts. Theory about

 

team contextual factors, emergent team states, and individual‐level influences on

 

dynamic team interaction processes enable us to develop a multilevel temporal

 

account of disagreement episodes. People are more likely to agree with a high-

 

status team member than a low-status one, and less likely to disagree with the

 

former than the latter. Specific behaviors can create distinct momentary

 

conversational contexts that could influence the likelihoods of starting or ending

 

disagreements. Team interactions are complex, temporal, multilevel phenomena.

 

They are complex because they entail members' interdependent acts. Multilevel

 

means their constituent behaviors are nested in temporal contexts, in individuals,

 

and in teams.

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   Disagreement episodes in team interactions are nested in temporal behavioral

 

contexts, individuals, and teams. They are subject to team context influences,

 

individual influences, and behavioral dynamics at the event level. Dynamic

 

influences at the team level concern emergent team states, such as team conflict

 

states. In this article, we look at how individual characteristics and attitudes about

 

the team may affect how a disagreement episode unfolds. We consider how the

 

relatively stable role of individual status affects interactions, specifically igniting

 

and resolving disagreements. We also consider fluid individual attributes, such as

 

evaluations of team viability and perceived team effectiveness.

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   In closing, the article discusses how disagreements are more about

 

conversational context than overall team conflict, suggesting that teams should

 

embrace content disagreements rather than avoid them. Team development

 

initiatives can promote the value of content disagreements and explain the

 

benefits of problem-solving communication. The link between problem‐solving

 

and disagreements also suggests the importance of creating a safe team context.

 

Individual status effects might interfere with content disagreements, even in

 

groups without explicit leaders. As team members are more likely to agree with

 

(and less likely to disagree with) a higher status person, they might defer to the

 

latter's judgment too quickly. Teams can aim for an open and welcoming

 

environment in which all members are invited to share their ideas. The article

 

findings also show that team flexibility is an important context for promoting

 

content disagreement, which can also be leveraged to improve teamwork. Team

 

training activities aimed at fostering members' sense of the sustainability and

 

growth of their team should be continuous in design, rather than one-shot team

 

workshops.

 

 

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Work Cited

Lehmann, Willenbrock, Nale, and Ming Ming Chiu. “Igniting and Resolving Content Disagreements during Team Interactions: A Statistical Discourse Analysis of Team Dynamics at Work.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 39, no. 9, Nov. 2018, pp. 1142–1162. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1002/job.2256.