Dysfunction and Power

Power struggles and team outcomes

Finally, we examine the downstream effects of our model on team outcomes, via intra-team power struggles. There are two key categories of team outcomes typically examined in the teams literature. The first category is team performance outcomes, or the degree to which a team accomplishes its goals, as seen in task-indicators such as team output quality, quantity, and efficiency. The second category is team viability, or the ability of the team to continue into the future based on member willingness to remain part of the team, as seen in socio-affective indicators, such as team commitment, satisfaction, and turnover intentions. We propose that intra-team power struggles jeopardize team performance and viability outcomes in various ways.

First, power struggles are likely to detract from team outcomes, as they distract members from their task at hand. Team members often struggle over power via political behaviors, such as coercion, lobbying, coalition formation, interruption, attempts to control, or impression management strategies. For instance, when two members are vying for power, they may spread gossip about each other or ingratiate other members to get them on their side. They may also try to dominate team meetings by pushing their own agenda and interrupting or even ignoring their rival's input. As members' time and energy are fixed resources, investing in power struggles thus inevitably crowds out members' time and energy toward core team goals. This directly hurts team performance, and when teams fail to meet goals, this can also negatively impact members' motivation to work in the team again, harming team viability outcomes as well.

Second, power struggles ruin the foundations of intra-team cooperation. The typical manners in which people struggle for power (e.g., coercion) create tension and hostility among team members, which undermines psychological safety, intra-team trust, and members' willingness to share information and cooperate with one another. When members are unwilling to cooperate together to achieve team goals, the value of teams are lost, and teams are unlikely to achieve their task goals. Additionally, when teams evolve a competitive, tense atmosphere in the team, members' emotional experience in the team is likely to be negatively impacted, harming team viability as well.

Finally, power struggles in teams are contagious - once triggered by one or more members, power struggles can quickly spread throughout the entire team. As people are sensitive to potential power loss, once power struggles emerge, other members might feel threatened, and thereby involuntarily get involved in power struggles to protect their own power positions. For example, in a department meeting in a university, if one professor enters into a fight with another professor about the allocation of resources to different areas in the department, other professors might be concerned about the resources going to their own areas as well, and feel compelled to join in the fray, illustrating how power struggles spiral and can derail team goals, such as the outcomes of this department meeting. In sum, we suggest that power struggles can harm team performance and viability outcomes by distracting members from team task accomplishment and hurting collaborative processes. We therefore propose:

Proposition 4

Intra-team power struggles detract from team outcomes, such as team performance and viability.