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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol.7, No.6
Publication Date: June 25, 2020
DOI:10.14738/assrj.76.8574.
Mumford, T. V. (2020). How Functional Team Roles Mitigate the Effect of Conflict on Team Performance. Advances in Social Sciences
Research Journal, 7(6) 833-840.
How Functional Team Roles Mitigate the Effect of Conflict on Team
Performance
Troy V. Mumford
College of Business, Colorado State University,
Fort Collins, CO
ABSTRACT
Work team structures are used in organizations to achieve higher
performance, enable greater creativity, and create more political buy in.
The literature suggests that when teams are able to coherently carry out
certain functional team roles, conflict is better managed and higher
performance is achieved. This study investigates these claims in a
sample of 449 individuals working in 94 project teams over two project
types. Findings indicate that the performance of task and social team
roles was negatively related to task and relationship conflict for both
work types. In addition, Spanning roles were negatively associated with
conflict only for the more complex project. Finally, functional team roles
were associated with team performance for both project types. The
implications for researching and managing roles in work teams are
discussed.
Keywords: Work Teams, Team Roles, Conflict, Performance, Team
Development.
INTRODUCTION
Over the past several decades, team structures have become ubiquitous in the workplace in order
to provide solutions to problems, complete work, and create implementable solutions that have
achieved buy in from diverse stakeholders. Research on teams has evolved to consider the inputs
brought into the team, the processes that the team engages in, the emergent states of those teams,
and the outcomes that the team produces [1]. Inherent in this logic is that teams develop into unique
entities and one of the defining features of these entities that has been researched for many decades
are the roles that are taken by individuals within the teams and the configuration of those roles [2].
The goal of this paper is to explore the team-level presence of roles, their relationship with team
conflict and the effectiveness of the team across two task types.
THE FUNCTIONS OF ROLES AND CONFLICT IN TEAMS
Team roles have been studied over many years and reviews of that research show that they have
been studied in at least three ways [3]. The first attempts to define roles in terms of configurations
of personality trait-like tendencies [4, 5] . A second stream of research attempts to describe the
clarity or ambiguity of the roles in abstract terms and considers the relationship between these
factors and outcomes [6, 7] ).The third stream attempts to define typologies of behavioral roles that
exist in teams [8, 9] [3]. This study will adopt the third approach. Mumford and colleagues [8]
produced a typology of 10 functional team roles. After reviewing all the typologies of team roles
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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.76.8574 834
Mumford, T. V. (2020). How Functional Team Roles Mitigate the Effect of Conflict on Team Performance. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal, 7(6)
833-840.
and broader research in leadership in teams, this typology, delineated ten team roles falling in three
functional categories. While other clusters of roles have been identified, the broader functional
categories of team roles appear to be known, intuitive, and robust [3] and provide a useful heuristic
for building knowledge on team roles. The functional categories represent the superordinate
functions that must occur within a team in order for it to be effective and consist of the Task
Function, the Social Function, and the Spanning Function.
Task Functional Roles
Teams in organizations are charged with the accomplishment of objectives or working to create
some value for the firm. The Task Functional roles are those roles that are directly related to the
accomplishment of that work [10]. Roles such as the Contractor role that involves making task
assignments and following up or the Contributor role that involves sharing critical expertise with
the team are typical task roles [9].
Given the task-centered nature of the Task Functional Roles it is likely that they play an important
part in driving team performance. If a team is not able to allocate its work effectively, share
information fluidly, or solve task-related problems, that dysfunction would lead to lower task
performance. Therefore, it is hypothesized that:
H1: Task Role Performance will be positively related to Team Performance
Social Functional Roles
In addition to the carrying out of the work, team structures are unique in that they also require the
maintenance type behaviors that build the teams capacity to work together on an ongoing basis.
Because teams are composed of separate members with their own identities, emotions, and
perceptions, actions must be taken in the team to preserve the integrating sentiments, emergent
states, and attitudes that will facilitate team functioning and learning [11]. The Communicator
social role, for example, involves providing compliments and displaying gratitude to other team
members and their efforts in the team. Similarly, the Calibrator role involves the laying out of
teamwork-related norms that will allow the team’s fluid functioning.
While Social Roles play an important part in the performance of the team, their criticality may
depend on several factors [2]. For example, certain tasks may require more social interaction than
others [12]. In addition, in short-term teams it may be that the lack of social role performance does
not have enough time to play out in overall team performance. These two hypotheses follow:
H2: Social Role Performance will be positively related to Team Performance
H3: The relationship with Team Performance will be stronger for Task Role Performance than for
Social Role Performance.
Spanning Functional Roles
More recent research on teams has highlighted the need to see teams as embedded elements of
more complex social systems [13, 14]. Spanning team roles capture those critical behaviors that
occur between the team and non-team actors [15]. These are roles that involve interfacing with
leaders, coworkers, or extra-organizational individuals in order to help the team meet its goals and
ensure its ongoing existence. One clear example of a spanning role is the Consul role. When taking