I‐Deals for Some Employees May (Not) Be Ideal for the Team: Positive and Negative Relationships Between I‐Deals Differentiation and Team Effectiveness

ABSTRACT Reflecting a more balanced employer–employee relationship in which employees have latitude to shape aspects of their employment, idiosyncratic deals (i‐deals) are voluntary, personalized, nonstandard agreements that employees negotiate with their employers. In teams, i‐deals differentiation (i‐deals D ), the extent to which the degree of these arrangements varies across members, is a key form of HR differentiation. While research has largely emphasized its negative effects, we propose that the impact of i‐deals D on team effectiveness depends on the type of i‐deals. We focus on career, flexibility, and task i‐deals, the most common types of i‐deals that employees across different jobs can negotiate with their manager. Drawing on social comparison theory, we argue that career and flexibility i‐deals D relate positively to team relationship conflict, and in turn associate with lower customer‐related outcomes. In contrast, task i‐deals D relate negatively to team relationship conflict, and subsequently associate positively with customer‐related outcomes. We test our model in two samples: a field study with three‐source data collected from 59 stores of a national restaurant chain located in the United States (Study 1) and a field study with two‐source data collected from 108 teams from three service companies located in China (Study 2). Across both studies, flexibility i‐deals D and task i‐deals D had a negative and a positive association, respectively, with team customer‐related outcomes via team relationship conflict, while career i‐deals D was unrelated to our outcomes of interest. We advance the literatures on i‐deals and HR differentiation, and offer practical insights into the implementation of i‐deals D in teams.