What Moderates the Relation Between Intragroup Conflict, Emotional Exhaustion, and Work Engagement?

To survive and thrive in an increasingly complex work environment, organizations often rely on workgroups. Workgroups are intended to provide an adaptive response to today’s work environment. Many workgroups, however, become hotbeds of conflict (Jehn and Mannix, 2001). Group members bring different values, norms, expertise, and attitudes to job-related and interpersonal issues. These differences can ignite intragroup conflict defined as real or perceived incompatibilities among group members (Jehn, 1995). Two broad types of intragroup conflict have been identified: relationship conflict and task conflict (Jehn, 1995). These conflict types are distinct, both in their nature and in their effects on workgroup outcomes (e.g., Jehn and Mannix, 2001). Even so, both types of intragroup conflict, especially relationship conflict, have detrimental effects on workgroup outcomes (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003; De Wit, Greer, and Jehn, 2012). Intragroup conflict is associated with a variety of psychological, behavioral, and physical symptoms (Bruk-Lee, Nixon and Spector, 2013; Meier et al., 2014) that threaten employees’ well-being (Dijkstra et al., 2005; Sonnentag, Unger, and Nägel, 2013). Yet, research investigating the distinct effects of relationship conflict and task conflict on the different aspects of well-being and moderators of this relationship is sparse. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relationships between intragroup conflict at the group level and employee well-being, and to examine how emotion regulation and conflict management might moderate this relationship. Employee well-being was measured via work engagement and emotional exhaustion, both of which were considered as collective (group-level) phenomena. We consider work engagement and emotional exhaustion as two distinct indicators of well-being at work (see Schaufeli et al., 2002). We assumed that studying what might increase positive aspects (work engagement) and reduce negative aspects (emotional exhaustion) of wellbeing would provide a robust representation of well-being in workgroups. Most previous research on work engagement and emotional exhaustion has examined these constructs at the individual level, treating group outcomes as statistical aggregations. In contrast, we examined and measured the constructs at the workgroup level, asking participants to assess work engagement and emotional exhaustion of their workgroup rather than of themselves. From a theoretical perspective, the psychological well-being manifested by one person can influence well-being of other people (Westman, 2001). This implies that work engagement and emotional exhaustion of one or more workgroup member can affect the work engagement and emotional exhaustion of the whole workgroup (see Bakker, Emmerik, and Euwema, 2006; Costa, Passos, and Bakker, 2014). An individual level of constructs such as work engagement ORIGINAL ARTICLE