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During team meetings, expressing negativity about other team members’ ideas and contributions – that is, negative disagreements – can derail team processes and harm team productivity. If team members want to improve their meetings and reduce negativity, which aspects are relevant starting points? This chapter discusses the complexity of this question by considering the interplay of team attributes, individual characteristics, and verbal interaction dynamics that may evoke negative disagreements in meetings. To this end, this chapter relies on existing behavioral and survey data of 259 employees nested in 43 team meetings that were analyzed using statistical discourse analysis. The results of this analysis highlight several potential starting points for reducing negativity in workplace meetings. First, we discovered that team attributes matter, as teams with a lower overall level of job satisfaction were more likely to experience negative disagreements during their meetings. Second, at the individual level, we found a significant gender effect such that women were more likely than men to start negative disagreements. Third, individual team members reporting lower organizational trust were more likely to start negative disagreements. Finally, counter to previous work on interaction dynamics during meetings, we could not identify specific verbal behaviors that triggered negative disagreements. In terms of practical implications, we discuss how managers can increase organizational trust and job satisfaction (e.g., through ensuring justice and improving job design) in order to encourage more positive meeting interactions.

The lack of a clear conceptualization and operationalization of the construct of interpersonal conflict makes it difficult to compare the results of different studies and hinders the accumulation of knowledge in the conflict domain. Defining interpersonal conflict as a dynamic process that occurs between interdependent parties as they experience negative emotional reactions to perceived disagreements and interference with the attainment of their goals, the present paper presents a two‐dimensional framework and a typology of interpersonal conflict that incorporates previous conceptualizations of the construct. The first dimension of the framework identifies three properties generally associated with conflict situations: disagreement, negative emotion, and interference. The framework's second dimension identifies two targets of interpersonal conflict encountered in organizational settings: task and interpersonal relationship. Based on this framework, the paper highlights several shortcomings of current conceptualizations and operationalizations of interpersonal conflict in the organizational literature, and provides suggestions for their remedy.

This paper investigates the role of economic disagreement in the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks. Economic disagreement is quantified with ex ante measures of cross-sectional dispersion in economic forecasts from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF), determining the degree of disagreement among professional forecasters over changes in economic fundamentals.

The authors introduce a broad index of economic disagreement based on the innovations in the cross-sectional dispersion of economic forecasts for output, inflation and unemployment so that the index is a shock measure that captures different aspects of disagreement over economic fundamentals and also reflects unexpected news or surprise about the state of the aggregate economy. After building the broad index of economic disagreement, the authors test out-of-sample performance of the index in predicting the cross-sectional variation in future stock returns.

Univariate portfolio analyses indicate that decile portfolios that are long in stocks with the lowest disagreement beta and short in stocks with the highest disagreement beta yield a risk-adjusted annual return of 7.2%. The results remain robust after controlling for well-known pricing effects. The results are consistent with a preference-based explanation that ambiguity-averse investors demand extra compensation to hold stocks with high disagreement risk and the investors are willing to pay high prices for stocks with large hedging benefits. The results also support the mispricing hypothesis that the high disagreement beta provides an indirect way to measure dispersed opinion and overpricing.

Most literature measures disagreement about individual stocks with the standard deviation of earnings forecasts made by financial analysts and examines the cross-sectional relation between this measure and individual stock returns. Unlike prior studies, the authors focus on disagreement about the economy instead of disagreement about earnings growth. The authors' argument is that disagreement about the economy is a major factor that would explain disagreement about stock fundamentals. The authors find that disagreement in economic forecasts does indeed have a significant impact on the cross-sectional pricing of individual stocks.

Through activism, brands participate in the sociopolitical controversies that shape society today. Based on social identity theory, this study aims to examine the moderating effects of consumer–brand identification (CBI) and political ideology in explaining consumer responses to brand activism. Furthermore, the role of perceived marginalization that can arise in the case of consumer–brand disagreement is explored.

The hypothesized effects were tested in three experiments. Study 1 (n = 262) and Study 2 (n = 322) used a moderation analysis, which was supplemented by a mixed design analysis with repeated measures in Study 1. In Study 3 (n = 383), the mediating effect of perceived marginalization by the brand was tested using a moderated mediation model.

The results show that strong CBI as well as a conservative ideology buffer the negative effects of consumer–brand disagreement on brand attitude and word-of-mouth intentions. In the case of agreement with a brand’s stance, no direct or interactive effects of brand activism on consumer responses occur. Perceived marginalization by a brand mediates the effects of brand activism.

This study extends the “love is blind” versus “love becomes hate” debate to the realm of brand activism and finds evidence for the former effect. It also contributes to the research on political consumption by highlighting the role of political ideology as an important boundary condition for brand activism. Perceived marginalization is identified as a relevant risk for activist brands.

Business confidence is crucial to firm decisions, but it is deeply related to professional forecasters' expectations. Since Brazil is an important inflation targeting country, this paper investigates whether monetary policy credibility and disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations relate to business confidence in Brazil. The study considers the aggregate business confidence index and the business confidence indexes for 11 industrial sectors in Brazil.

The authors run ordinary least squares and generalized method of moments regressions to assess the direct effects of disagreements in expectation and monetary policy credibility on business confidence. The authors also make use of Wald test of parameter equality to observe whether there are “offsetting effects” of monetary credibility in mitigating the effects of both disagreements in expectations on business confidence. Besides, the authors run quantile regressions to analyze the effect of the main explanatory variables of interest on business confidence in contexts where business confidence is low (pessimistic) or high (optimistic).

Disagreements in inflation expectations reduce business confidence, monetary policy credibility improves business confidence and credibility mitigates the adverse effects of disagreements in expectations on business confidence. The sectors most sensitive to monetary policy credibility are Rubber, Motor Vehicles, Metallurgy, Metal Products and Cellulose. The findings also suggest the effect of disagreement in inflation expectations on business confidence decreases as confidence increases, and the effect of monetary policy credibility on business confidence increases as entrepreneurs are more optimistic.

While there is evidence that monetary policy credibility is beneficial to the economy, there are no studies on the effects of disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations on business confidence (at the aggregate and sectoral levels). Besides, there are no studies that have investigated whether monetary policy credibility can mitigate the effects of disagreements in inflation and interest rate expectations on business confidence (at the aggregate and sectoral levels). Therefore, there are gaps to be filled in the literature addressing business confidence, monetary policy credibility and disagreements in expectations. These issues are particularly important to inflation targeting developing countries.

Independence is the cornerstone of the auditing profession. Even so, it is often assumed that acquiescing to the audit client when a disagreement occurs is more beneficial to the auditor-client relationship than asserting one’s independence (e.g., see Wang & Tuttle, 2009). We look more closely at the issue in the context of auditor-client management disagreements as recalled by experienced auditors.

We find that for most disagreements in which the auditor did not make any concession at all, the auditor-client relationship was either unaffected or strengthened. We find that a client’s use of pressure tactics did not appear to influence whether or not the auditor made a concession, but that a client’s use of pressure tactics, was associated with damage to the auditor-client relationship. The importance of the issue causing a disagreement was positively associated with the likelihood of the auditor staying with his/her initial position.

This study aims to examine how and when task and process conflicts relate to relationship conflict by detailing the mediating role of negative emotions and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence.

Survey data were collected from 462 employees working in different organizations in Pakistan.

The results revealed that individuals engaged in task and process conflicts are more likely to feel negative emotions toward others and consequently are more likely to engage in relationship conflict in the workplace. This mediated relationship of task and process conflicts with relationship conflict via negative emotions is lower when employees are more emotionally intelligent.

This study pinpointed a key mechanism, negative emotions, by which task and process conflicts lead to relationship conflict. Emotionally intelligent individuals are better at regulating their negative emotions; therefore, emotional intelligence training can be an effective tool for minimizing employees’ negative emotions during task and process conflicts, which can help reduce relationship conflict.

By examining the mediating role of negative emotions and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence, this study adds to the previous research by detailing how and when task and process conflicts lead to relationship conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how disagreement between supervisors and their subordinates on leadership style (transformational and transactional) is related to employees’ outcomes, considering both work team characteristics (social support and conflict), and employees’ well-being (burnout, work engagement and poor health). The role played by the size of the work team is also analysed.

The sample is composed of 24 supervisors and 468 employees working in grocery stores of a large retail chain; 369 employees worked in 14 medium-size work teams and 99 employees worked in small-size work teams. Disagreement on leadership style between supervisors and their subordinates has been computed as the difference between the score reported by the supervisor and the score reported by the worker on the same items. Linear regression analyses, ANOVA and multilevel analyses have been computed.

Multilevel analyses results showed that, considering the disagreement on transformational and transactional leadership style and the work team size, only disagreement on the transformational leadership style is related to employees’ outcomes. Higher clustering effects, meaning that the between-groups variability was bigger than the variability within groups, have been found in conflict between members and burnout. Furthermore, results showed that work team size moderated the relationship between disagreement on transformational leadership style and burnout.

In order to enhance workers’ well-being and produce a better working climate it could be useful to focus on reducing the disagreement on leadership style between leaders and theirs subordinates.

Disagreement between supervisors and their subordinates, in order to understand the role played by leadership on work team characteristics and workers’ well-being, has rarely been studied before.

This study aims to reveal the role of performance on the likelihood of conflict occurrence and the conditions that affect this relationship. This study measures managers’ perceptions about the cause of the subordinate’s low-level performance, stability of the performance, propensity to trust of managers and investigate the effects of them on conflict types.

This study draws on the attribution theory for investigating the effect of the negative performance of subordinates on a conflict between manager and subordinate by using the quantitative research method. A random sample was drawn from 150 Turkish mid-level managers from midsized small and medium - sized enterprises companies. The hypotheses are tested by hierarchical linear modeling.

According to results, negative performance of subordinates may predict the types of conflict depending on the attributions of managers about negative performance. In addition, the manager’s attributions to the locus of control or/and to the stability affect the likelihood of conflict types occurrence, between managers and subordinates. Depending on the managers’ attributions, the propensity to trust of managers has a significant moderation effect on the relationship between performance of subordinates and the likelihood of conflict types occurrence.

This study advances knowledge on conditions that affect the likelihood of conflict occurrence. It contributes to the literature by suggesting performance as a predictor of conflict instead of an outcome of the conflict. The research is one of the rare studies investigating the relationship between attributions and conflict. In addition, it expands the understanding of personal traits and conflict interaction by testing the moderation effect of propensity to trust.