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How to manage outsourced employees in interorganizational teams with triangular relationships has not yet attracted enough attention. Based on relative deprivation theory, this study explores how relative deprivation affects outsourced employees’ innovative behavior and investigates the complex moderating effects of dual organizational support.

The authors tested their hypothesis by conducting a two-wave survey; responses to a questionnaire were collected from 283 outsourced employees and their managers among 52 client organizations.

Results found that relative deprivation negatively influences the outsourced employees’ innovative behavior by eliciting their perceptions of status conflict. Support from client (supplier) organization attenuates (aggravates) the positive impact of relative deprivation on innovative behavior throughout status conflict. The moderating effect of client organizational support was moderated by support from supplier organization.

The authors selected the outsourced employees in a Chinese context to conduct this study, and the results need to be generalized in future research.

Client organizational support can alleviate the negative effect of relative deprivation on outsourced employees, whereas supplier organization support aggravates the negative effect; managers should pay attention to the different effects of the two organizations’ support and provide reasonable support for outsourced employees.

This study identified the mechanism of relative deprivation’s effect on outsourced employees’ innovative behavior from the perspective of interpersonal interaction and compared the effect of support from dual organizations. This study expands the research on triangular relationships, relative deprivation, status conflict and other field.

This study aims to look at the interaction dynamics among engineering professionals from the lens of status hierarchies and derive on the role of intragroup conflicts prevalent in engineering teams. It develops and tests a comprehensive moderated-mediation model combining interpersonal status dynamics (of talent and conflicts prevalent within the team) with team external power dynamics (with other teams) and their resultant effect on team performance through the intragroup conflicts.

Data at team level from 1,265 members belonging to 218 engineering teams were used for hypothesis testing.

Process and status conflicts fully explain the negative effect of having more talented members in teams on team performance. High talented teams have lower levels of process and status conflicts and higher levels of performance when they have high power.

This paper contributes to the literature on engineering teams, team status, power and conflicts.

This paper advises manager on where to exactly look for problems in the internal working of talented teams and conditions that could negatively impact their performance.

Research on teams’ internal composition and team performance link remains inconclusive. The established pattern of thinking in both practice and research is that having more talented members in the engineering teams is attached to superior performance. Whereas it is often the case that even after having multiple talented members, teams are not able to perform well. With some exceptions, studies have not paid attention to the dynamics of having more talented members and its flip side on team performance.

This study investigates the relationship between leaders’ collectivist orientation and employees’ innovative behavior, as well as the mediating effects of employees’ collectivist orientation and servant leadership.

Based on a survey of 40 leaders and 219 employees in 12 technologically innovative enterprises in Jiangsu Province, China, a hierarchical linear modeling is used.

The results show that leaders’ collectivist orientation significantly positively affects employees’ innovative behavior. Moreover, leaders’ collectivist orientation significantly positively affects employees’ collectivist orientation/servant leadership, employees’ collectivist orientation/servant leadership significantly positively affects employees’ innovative behavior, and employees’ collectivist orientation/servant leadership partially mediates the relationship between leaders’ collectivist orientation and employees’ innovative behavior.

In response to the lack of research on the relationship between leadership cultural orientation and employees’ innovative behavior, this study sheds light on the effectiveness and mechanism of the influence of leaders’ collectivist orientation on employees’ innovative behavior, thus expanding and deepening the boundaries of theoretical research on leadership, culture and innovation management.

This study aims to examine the relationships between three styles of conflict management [cooperative conflict management (COP), competitive conflict management (COM) and avoidance conflict management (AVO)], the subjective relational experience, perceived insider status, organization-based self-esteem and employees’ service innovation behavior in the airline industry.

Through both offline and online survey methods, a total of 304 Korean employees of eight airline firms in Asia were asked to complete the questionnaire. A structural equation modeling analysis was conducted to test the proposed hypotheses.

COP and AVO had significant positive effects on the subjective relational experience, and COM had a significant negative effect on the subjective relational experience. In the subsequent process, the subjective relational experience had a significant positive effect on the perceived insider status but not on organization-based self-esteem and employees’ service innovation behavior. Finally, the perceived insider status and organization-based self-esteem had significant positive effects on employees’ service innovation behavior.

The results have important practical implications for developing human resource management (HRM) practices in airline firms. More specifically, airline firms should provide management training courses that encourage team leaders to create environments in which employees can form an attitude of “we are in it together”, collect conflict issues from employees in a unanimous manner and then resolve them smoothly without further problems and avoid treating conflicts as win-lose contests. These guidelines may help employees unwind from conflict situations and maintain positive relationships with their colleagues.

Previous studies have paid little attention to effects of conflict management styles on employees’ service innovation behavior through positive psychological experiences based on a holistic model. The results offer new insights into the extended model and have valuable implications for HRM practices in the airline industry.

We aim to explore whether demographic groups of varying status positions differ in terms of their perception of work group members’ openness to deep-level and surface-level diversity. We also explore the effect that task group conflict and relational group conflict have on perceptions of openness to diversity.

Quantitative analysis of responses from 489 academics in multicultural university departments is applied. A comparison is made of different demographic groups based on age, nationality, and seniority with regard to perceptions of work group members’ openness to diversity. Specifically, we focused on perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarity (deep-level) and openness to visible dissimilarity (surface-level).

We found that there are indeed differences between demographic groups with regard to perceptions of the work group’s openness to value dissimilarities. No significant differences could be found in relation to openness to visual dissimilarities for any of the demographic sub-samples. We also found that there were differential effects of contextual adverse circumstances in the form of relational group conflict and task group conflict on the perceptions of the two types of work group openness to diversity.

The knowledge that different demographical groups perceive their peers’ openness to diversity differently is an important insight when decisions regarding diversity issues have to be taken.

Few studies have focused on perceptions of diversity. This is an important omission because individuals often act upon their perceptions, rather than on objective reality.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Koslowsky and Schwarzwald’s (2009) recent conceptualization of the interpersonal power interaction model which assumed that the choice of power tactics in conflict situations is a sequential process including antecedents, mediators, and the choice of influence tactics. The mediation process is the new component of the model, thus the authors tested two potential mediators – perceived damage and negative emotions – in the choice process.

Managers (n=240) were presented with conflict scenarios involving one of their subordinates (low/high performing) and differed by conflict type (relations/task and principle/expediency). They indicated the influence tactics they would utilize in the given situation for gaining compliance and completed a series of questionnaires: perceived damage engendered by disobedience, resultant emotion, cognitive closure, and demographics.

Results indicated that perceived damage, directly and through the mediation of resultant negative emotions, influenced the tendency to opt for harsh tactics. This trend was further affected by the managers’ gender and cognitive closure.

The discussion addresses the empirical validity of the model, the role of rationality and emotion in the process of choosing influence tactics. Practical implications concerning the usage of harsh and soft tactics and the limitation of the self-report method were also discussed.

The contribution of the study is twofolded: proving the empirical validity of the new conceptualization of the model and explaining the dynamic involved in the choice of influence tactics.

The purpose of this study is to integrate status conflict, as a relatively recent and unexplored phenomenon, to the family business literature.

The authors follow multilevel theory building to develop a multilevel conceptual model of status conflict in family firms (FFs).

The authors identify the main antecedents, processes and consequences of status conflict at three levels of analysis (individual, family and firm) unique to FFs. Seventeen theoretical propositions at three levels of analysis are presented.

The authors address the need for multilevel research for organisations and multilevel status research, contribute to the under-researched theory of conflicts in FFs and show that the conflict literature, which has predominantly focussed on the individual- and group-level factors, can borrow from the family business literature, which has primarily been oriented to the group- and firm-level factors.

In management research, little is known about how ethno-racial minority leaders interact with similar employees in supervisor–subordinate relationships. This study aims to examine and provide a deeper understanding of individuals’ negative reactions to similar others, thus highlighting the double-edged nature of demographic similarity which has historically predicted positive affective reactions.

Using a survey design, the authors collected data from supervisor-subordinate dyads from multiple companies from the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex in Texas, USA. They used ordinary least squares regression and conditional process analysis to test the hypotheses, including a two-stage moderation and moderated mediation.

Incorporating social context, i.e. minority status, as a moderator, the results show that ethno-racial minority leaders supervising ethno-racially similar subordinates were more vulnerable to relationship conflict than non-minority dyads. This, in turn, is linked to a reduction in the leaders’ feelings of trust toward their ethno-racially similar subordinate.

This study draws on social identity theory and status characteristics theory to explain the contradictory processes and outcomes associated with dyadic ethno-racial similarity and suggests the conditions under which dyad racial similarity is connected with unfavorable outcomes. This framework helps to broaden the boundary conditions of relational demography to provide a more nuanced explanation of when and why minority leaders in demographically similar hierarchical dyads experience more relationship conflict, which ultimately diminishes trust.