The Burden of Seeing You: Relationship Conflict, Depletion, and Interpersonal Harming and Helping Behaviors

Description

Evidence shows that relationship conflict, defined as “personal incompatibilities of valuesor perspectives” (Jehn, 1995), severely compromises employees’ well-being, workattitudes, and job performance, and may also reduce team effectiveness (De Dreu, 1997;De Dreu, & Weingart, 2003). Research has conceptualized relationship conflict as adyadic phenomenon (i.e., a function of the relationship between an actor and a target)while studying it empirically from the perspectives of the individual and team,disregarding its dynamic nature (Korsgaard, Jeong, Mahony, & Pitariu, 2008). As aresult, most studies overlook the dyadic, interpersonal consequences of relationshipconflict and fail to identify why individuals may find interacting with some of theircoworkers particularly stressful and depleting (i.e., an individual’s internal resources foreffective self-regulation are drained in a particular social encounter; Schmeichel, Voh,& Baumeister, 2003) and how this may drive them to engage selectively in harmful andhelpful behavior.Drawing on self-regulatory depletion theory (Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice,1998), we suggest that an individual may find relationship conflict with a team memberparticularly depleting when his or her (1) suppression is high or (2) reappraisal is low.Moreover, a substantial body of work suggests that depletion leads to counterproductiveand deviant behavior (such as reduced helping and increased harming; Stucke &Baumeister, 2006; Xu, Begue, & Bush, 2012). Our own recent studies, for example,suggest that depleted individuals tend to abuse others or harm their coworkers (Deng,Walter, Lam, & Zhao, 2014; Lam, Walter, & Huang, 2014). More importantly, suchdeviant behavior may be shaped by teams’ goal interdependence (Lam, Van der Vegt,Walter, & Huang, 2011; Walter, Lam, Van der Vegt, Huang, & Miao, 2012). Building onthis foundation, we propose a multilevel model positing that: (1) an actor’s depletioncaused by a specific relationship conflict with a target depends on his or her suppressionand reappraisal; (2) a depleted actor may respond to the conflict by increasing harmingor decreasing helping behavior toward the target; and (3) a team’s goal interdependencemay function as a cross-level moderator, influencing the indirect link betweenrelationship conflict and interpersonal behavior through target-specific depletion.We will examine these issues through a series of multimethod studies, combininglaboratory experiments, longitudinal field surveys, and field experiments. The project willhighlight the interpersonal consequences of relationship conflict, assisting organizations’efforts to confine its negative and promote its positive outcomes.