What's the difference? Insider perspectives on theimportance, content, and meaning ofinterpersonal differences

摘要

This study presents a new approach to examine how team members experienceinterpersonal differences. This approach offers a way to examine how team membersexperience their differences with specific other individuals, and how these differencesare related to the amount of perceived conflict with these individuals in anorganizational context. Data from a non-profit governmental institution in TheNetherlands were analysed, including 80 participants from 15 diverse teams. Five typesof differences were salient to the individuals in this sample: differences related toextraversion; work pose; approach to work; task-related expertise; and seniority.Furthermore, individuals tend to contrast positive and negative evaluations ofdifferences related to extraversion and approaches to work, but to conceptualizepositive and negative evaluations of task-related expertise, seniority, and work pose asmore mutually independent phenomena. Moreover, we found that differences relatedto task-related expertise were negatively related to both task and relationship conflict.In contrast, differences related to extraversion were positively related to both task andrelationship conflict. Finally, the approach-to-work cluster was positively related to onlytask conflict.