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1. Introduction
Team has become an important work unit in contemporary organizations due to it’s flexible, interactive, and dynamic characteristics (Richter et al., 2006). A team typically includes members with diversified expertise and experiences. In this case, members with different expertise and knowledge background have their own cognitions and perspectives, which provide the whole team various options (Mannix and Neale, 2005). The benefit of this configuration is the heterogeneous knowledge base that helps a team exploit and explore knowledge into practice. However, the drawback of this configuration is team relationship conflicts, which refers to disagreement and infighting due to personal “incompatibility […], and typically includes tension, animosity, and annoyance among members within a group”(Jehn, 1995: p. 258). In contrast to task-related conflict, relationship conflict is caused by different cognitions, ideas, background and so on, which undermines the efficiency of teamwork, stability of team structure and hinders team effectiveness (DeWit et al., 2012; He et al., 2014; Xie et al., 2012).
Prior studies argued that relationship conflict brings anxiety and hostility; diminishes identification, trust and commitment (Rispens et al., 2007); and also reduces collaborative problem-solving capabilities and work efficiency (Costa et al., 2015). Scholars have agreed that relationship conflict is detrimental to team’s work performance (DeWit et al., 2012), and it is even more disruptive than task conflict to team members’ satisfaction (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003). Nevertheless, it is surprised to find that extant studies mainly focused on mechanisms mitigating the negative effect of task conflict from multiple perspectives (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003), while the paths to remit the negative effects of relationship conflict have largely been overlooked, except for De Dreu and Van Vianen (2001), who suggested that relationship conflict should best be avoided rather than dealt with collaboration or contention. In that way, are team members experiencing relationship conflict destined to fail?
To answer this question, recent studies concerned moderators that remit the negative effects of relationship conflict from team perspective or conflict factors, such as shared leadership(Hu et al., 2017), team mindfulness (Yu and Zellmer-Bruhn, 2018), early levels of conflict types(Maltarich et al., 2018) and collaborative conflict handling style (Auh et al., 2014). However, the role of emotion in alleviating relationship...
