The paradox of team conflict revisited: an updated meta-analysis of the team conflict– team performance relationships

The possibility that team conflict, especially task conflict, might improve team performance has stimulated a large body of empirical research that continues to grow to this day. Nevertheless, 12 years has passed since de Wit et al.’s (2012) comprehensive meta-analysis. To synthesize the even larger body of empirical evidence now available, we provide an updated meta-analysis of the team conflict–team performance relationships by revisiting the population average estimates and their effect size heterogeneity. Given the recent developments in the team conflict literature, we also incorporate status conflict into our synthesis. Moreover, to shed light on the contextual factors that may help explain the heterogeneous team conflict–team performance relationships, we examine a host of moderators pertaining to national culture, team features, and research methods. Our results based on psychometric meta-analysis indicate that all four team conflict dimensions (i.e., task conflict, relationship conflict, process conflict, and status conflict) are negatively related to team performance. Moreover, the relationships of task conflict and relationship conflict with team performance have substantial cross-situation heterogeneity. Examining the contingencies of these heterogeneous relationships, our metaregression analyses reveal that national culture (e.g., individualism), team features (e.g., team performance facet), and methodological factors (e.g., team conflict scale) all play important roles in helping to explain the mixed effects of team conflict on team performance. Based on our quantitative synthesis, we discuss the implications for the next waves of team conflict research.