Conflict Is Good

Leadership and leadership styles received considerable attention in the literature on groups. The behavioral patterns of leaders influence the attitudes, motivation and satisfaction of the group members as well as the productive outcomes of the group. Not much attention is shown, however, to the impact of leadership styles on teamwork quality or to the interplay between intra-group conflict and leadership styles in group settings. Nowadays, a common distinction exists in the literature between task and relationship conflict and most of the literature focused on the impact of these forms of intra-group conflict on team outcomes, or on the interplay between intra-group conflict and other emergent states in groups with little to no attention on how intra-group conflict relates to teamwork quality and how leadership influences this relationship.

The leading models of team effectiveness are based on the open system approach and they acknowledge the key role of group processes for group effectiveness. Recent research argues that intra-group conflict is an emergent state that is closely related to group processes in generating the specific outcomes of the group. Therefore exploring the moderating role of leadership styles on the interplay between intra-group conflict and teamwork quality is of great relevance for understanding of group dynamics and performance. The aim of this study was to further explore the way in which task and relationship conflict influence teamwork quality and to test the moderating role of leadership styles in this relationship. In particular, the study tests a contingency model of teamwork quality in which leadership styles moderate the relationship between task and relationship conflict on the one hand and teamwork quality on the other hand.