U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business, United States
When negative emotions arise during task conflicts, team performance depends on how the team’s leader navigates the paradox of needing to both unpack the emotion’s informational value to support conflict resolution and contain the negative emotionality that can impair conflict resolution. Because of the difficulty in resolving this paradox, past work has often concluded that a leader’s best choice is to avoid acknowledging negative emotions in conflict. We leverage emotion-response theory to challenge this conclusion, positing instead that leader acknowledgment of followers’ emotions allows teams to get to the heart of their task conflicts and improve their performance. We propose that leader emotional acknowledgment (i.e., expressing recognition of an emotion without seeking to change it), more than avoidance, can reduce negative emotionality in teams, thereby increasing performance-benefitting elaboration of task conflict-relevant information and reducing performance-harming mutation of task conflicts into process or relationship conflicts. We show support for our model in an experiment of 189 face-to-face teams and a pre-registered online experiment. Our findings offer a resolution for the paradox of negative emotions in team conflicts and a counterpoint to the common assumption that leaders should avoid followers’ emotions during conflict.