For a Rainy Day: Preventing the Escalation of Threats into Interorganizational Relationship Conflict through Emotional Regulation and Boundary-Spanning Roles

Interorganizational relationship conflict has attracted much attention from researchers and practitioners in construction projects considering its important economic and social consequences. Yet, previous studies on conflict management focus more on contextual variables while neglecting the more front-end and subtle individual factors. Such gap makes the project partners fail to respond and chop the interorganizational relationship quality deftly in the embryonic stage. This article integrates the threat-rigidity theory and boundary spanning theory to explore how the threat perception of boundary spanners affects interorganizational relationship conflicts. Furthermore, this article introduced emotion regulation strategy including cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression into the front-end of relationship quality to moderate the negative effect of perceived threat on boundary spanning roles. Using a survey-based approach, data were collected from 287 boundary spanners (project managers and cross-functional team members) across 60 construction projects selected via convenience sampling. Data analysis employed structural equation modeling (SEM) to test hypotheses. Findings showed that the perceived threat of boundary spanners can grow into interorganizational relationship quality through the mediating effect of their boundary spanning roles. Besides, the cognitive reappraisal is effective as a moderator regarding the effect of perceived threat on information processing while it loses effectiveness in terms of suppression has no impact. Yet, expressive suppression exaggerated the threat rigidity tendency on the external representative of boundary spanners. This article provides a new sight to explore dynamic relationship conflict and calls for fostering threat reduce strategy and abilities by boundary spanners at the early stage of interorganizational relationship conflict.