The dysfunctions of power in teams: A review and emergent conflict perspective

By Lindred L. Greer, L. Bunderen, Siyu Yu. 2017

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract We review the new and growing body of work on power in teams and use this review to develop an emergent theory of how power impacts team outcomes. Our paper offers three primary contributions. First, our review highlights potentially incorrect assumptions that have arisen around the topic of power in teams and documents the areas and findings that appear most robust in explaining the effects of power on teams. Second, we contrast the findings of this review with what is known about the effects of power on individuals and highlight the directionally oppositional effects of power that emerge across different levels of analysis. Third, we integrate findings across levels of analysis into an emergent theory which explains why and when the benefits of power for individuals may paradoxically explain the potentially negative effects of power on team outcomes. We elaborate on how individual social comparisons within teams where at least one member has power increase intra-team power sensitivity, which we define as a state in which team members are excessively perceptive of, affected by, and responsive to resources. We theorize that when power-sensitized teams experience resource threats (either stemming from external threats or personal threats within the team), these threats will ignite internal power sensitivities and set into play performance-detracting intra-team power struggles. This conflict account of power in teams integrates and organizes past findings in this area to explain why and when power negatively affects team-level outcomes, and opens the door for future research to better understand why and when power may benefit team outcomes when power’s dark side for teams is removed.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1e645ddbfd2c2dafd8d0b546ff746fe9f8e972a

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

When Interteam Conflict Spirals into Intrateam Power Struggles: The Pivotal Role of Team Power Structures (2017, background): “…the conditional precursors of power struggles in teams, we contribute to the growing literature on power dynamics in teams (for a recent review, see Greer et al., 2017; Greer, Van Bunderen, & Yu, 2017), which has hitherto predominantly focused on cooperative intrateam power dynamics (Aime et al.,…”