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Purpose – There are a number of ongoing debates in the organizational literature about conflict in groups and teams. We investigate two “conflicts about conflict” (i.e., two meta-conflicts) in the literature: we examine whether and under what conditions conflict in workgroups might be beneficial and we also explore the idea that group members may not always perceive the same levels of conflict.

Design/approach – We bring together the research and theorizing of the past 15 years to inform the current state of literature and move forward research on these conflicts about conflict. We examine and develop the two meta-conflicts to illustrate the importance of studying these ideas and to provide guidance for future research.

Findings – These two meta-conflicts in the conflict literature are important to investigate as conflict is a multifaceted construct that contains many dimensions that may influence group outcomes. We explore these two issues by briefly reviewing the literature on conflict and then highlighting some of the recent research on the conflict debate (i.e., is conflict constructive or destructive?) and conflict asymmetry in workgroups.

Originality/value – We identify interesting areas that future researchers could explore with respect to team conflict and conflict asymmetry.

In this chapter, we attempt to better understand the mechanisms underlying the effects of process conflict on team performance by exploring the role of negative affect in explaining the negative effects of process conflict on performance. Our findings show that negative affect does fully mediate the relationship between process conflict and group performance. Additionally, we investigate a set of conditions relating to fairness concerns and group context, which may have an influence on the relationship between process conflict and negative affect. We find that when voice is high and perceived goal obstruction and subgroup existence are low, the relationship between process conflict and negative affect is ameliorated, thus allowing for more positive effects of process conflict to emerge.

Early efforts in the study of groups had an inherently temporal dimension, notably work on group dynamics and the related study of phases in group problem solving. Not surprisingly, the majority of work linking time to groups has focused on team development. By contrast, work on team performance has tended to take the form Input-Process-Output, in which the passage of time is implied. There is rarely a discussion of how processes might be affected by timing. We suggest ways in which the two literatures might be brought together. We review models of group development and group performance, propose ways in which temporal issues can be integrated into performance models, and conclude by raising questions for future theory and empirical investigation.

Purpose – Negotiations can be stressful, yet are unavoidable in many organizations. Members of organizational workgroups for instance need to negotiate about issues such as task division and different ideas on how to complete a project. Until recently little research effort has been directed to understanding negotiators' stress responses. Similarly, little is known about the consequences that these stress responses may have on negotiation outcomes. In this chapter we argue that group members' physiological stress responses are a key determinant of the outcomes of intragroup negotiations.

Design/Methodology/Approach – We focus on two distinct physiological responses (i.e., threat and challenge) and argue that relative to threat responses, challenge responses will be related to superior information sharing, information processing, and decision-making quality. Moving beyond a uniform relationship between physiological reactions and negotiators' behaviors and outcomes, we also focus on two moderating characteristics: the relative power of group members, and whether the negotiation is purely task related, or co-occurs with relationship issues. We discuss effects on both the individual and the group level, extend our ideas to other forms of negotiations, and end with practical and theoretical implications.

Originality/Value – A better understanding of psychophysiological processes during intragroup negotiations may help to explain when intragroup disagreements help or hinder group outcomes and, therefore, may help to solve the paradox of intragroup conflict.

Control crews in high reliability organizations must react quickly to identify and resolve potentially disastrous nonroutine events. However, much of the previous work concerning control crew performance has focused either on the impact of automated systems on crews' nonroutine event management or on case study accounts concerning the social systems of crews during these abnormal events. This paper suggests that by focusing on elements of both systems—automated and social—a general model of control crew performance can be developed. The model presented here suggests that system interface characteristics affect the speed with which crews identify nonroutine events, and that task-based conflict affects the speed with which crews resolve nonroutine events. Testable propositions are derived from the model, and implications for both future research and practice are discussed.