Discussion

As the epic power struggle between Apple’s founder Steve Jobs and Apple’s CEO John Sculley illustrates, power within the team context may have detrimental consequences for teams and their broader organizations. With our conflict account of power in teams, which emerges from our review of the literature on both the team-level and the individual-level effects of power, we aim to explain why and when power may harm teams. We outline below the immediate theoretical implications of our review and emergent model, and then address new and important topics for future research that our paper helps to open as viable and important channels for future research, including the need to identify the potential upsides of power for teams.

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