Controversy without conflict: How group emotional awareness and regulation can prevent conflict escalation

We investigate whether group emotional awareness can prevent the escalation of controversy into conflict in project teams. We propose that group emotional awareness mitigates the impact of initial task conflicts on the development of group emotion regulation. This, in turn, prevents the escalation of task into relationship conflicts. We test our proposed model through a longitudinal design on project teams over the duration of a 3-month project, from the onset of their work together till the completion of the project. Group emotional awareness mitigates the impact of high levels of initial task conflict on the development of emotion regulation: the latter lacks conditions to develop when group emotional awareness is low and groups experience task conflict and can only develop under high emotional awareness conditions. Once in place, group emotional regulation reduces the likelihood of task conflicts escalating to relationship conflicts

When holding in prevents from reaching out: Emotion suppression and social support-seeking in multicultural groups

Members of multicultural groups benefit from developing diverse social support networks. Engaging openly with people who have a different worldview (i.e., given by a different cultural background) broadens one’s cognitive horizons, facilitates one’s adaptation to new contexts, decreases stereotyping and discrimination and generally improves individual and group performance. However, if this social connection is hindered (either by limiting the number of people one reaches out to or in terms of preferring to connect to similar others), then the diversity advantage is lost – both for the individuals and for the groups. Through two case studies of professional groups with varying cultural diversity (moderate and superdiverse), we investigate the evolution of their members’ social support networks (i.e., to what extent and to whom they reach out for support) depending on (1) individuals’ habitual emotion suppression and (2) cultural orientation on the individualism-collectivism dimension. Results show that individualistic cultures suffer a double-whammy: when suppressing, their members seek less support (i.e., don’t reach out so much to ask for support) and tend to seek culturally similar others for it when they do. Suppressing collectivists are less affected in absolute levels of connectedness, but still prefer culturally similar others as sources of support. Our study offers an emotion-based view of why people stick together with similar others in diverse groups and how learning to better cope with emotions can make us more open-minded towards diversity in professional settings

International Workshop on Teamworking

The main theme of the conference is “The challenges of working with diversity in social systems”. With the general demographic trends and the challenges raised by the multiple (simultaneous) transitions faced by society today, diversity is a key topic on the research agendas in Social Sciences. We strive to harness the benefits of diversity in solving difficult societal and environmental issues and at the same time we try to find solutions to the problems associated with diversity (e.g., conflict, marginalization, exclusion)