"Members’ Needs, Group Conflict, and Group Performance"

Focusing on “what people want in their groups” as a critical antecedent of conflict among them, the present research theorizes and empirically investigates the comprehensive relationship between within-group composition of psychological needs and group conflict based on multi-source data from 148 organizational teams. Utilizing within-group average and dispersion to capture the group-level composition of members’ need, the present study found significant relationships between the composition of need for achievement and task conflict, need for affiliation and relationship conflict, and need for power and status conflict. Some of these relationships were moderated by open communication among members. The analysis also demonstrated that when the three dimensions of conflict were considered together, task conflict was a positive predictor of group performance whereas relationship conflict was a negative predictor. The present findings highlight the significance of members’ psychological characteristics as pre...