They found that groups whose members trusted one another's competence and integrity were more likely to engage in task conflict without succumbing to relationship conflict.
But, as Tony Simons and Randall Peterson, of Cornell, mention in a study of seventy top management teams, groups that engage in "task conflict" also often suffer from "relationship conflict".
Social scientists like to say that good decision-making groups engage in "task conflict," fighting over the best solutions to particular problems, while bad ones engage in "relationship conflict," interpreting differences of opinion as differences of character.
The interpersonal conflict in organizations can be classified into two types – Relationship conflict and Task conflict (Jehn, 1995).
Moderate task conflict has generally been associated with higher group performance, and relationship conflict associated with lower performance.
Amason and Jehn respectively found that the outcome of task conflict can be functional or dysfunctional depending on the circumstances.
However, the consequence of task conflict is found to be functional/positive in few literatures and dysfunctional in others.
Firstly, we determined the scope of tasks that may need to be eliminated to resolve the task conflict according to the time window of the emergency task.
Event related potentials indicated that the task conflict effect began before the response conflict effect and carried on in parallel with it.
Study 1 with 160 employees from the healthcare sector showed that the positive effect of task conflict on relationship conflict was significant for low TSC employees and non-existent for high TSC employees.
