Controversy without conflict: How group emotional awareness and regulation can prevent conflict escalation

Abstract

We investigate whether group emotional awareness can prevent the escalation of controversy into conflict in project teams. We propose that group emotional awareness mitigates the impact of initial task conflicts on the development of group emotion regulation. This, in turn, prevents the escalation of task into relationship conflicts. We test our proposed model through a longitudinal design on project teams over the duration of a 3-month project, from the onset of their work together till the completion of the project. Group emotional awareness mitigates the impact of high levels of initial task conflict on the development of emotion regulation: the latter lacks conditions to develop when group emotional awareness is low and groups experience task conflict and can only develop under high emotional awareness conditions. Once in place, group emotional regulation reduces the likelihood of task conflicts escalating to relationship conflicts.