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When too little or too much hurts: Evidence for a curvilinear relationship between team faultlines and performance

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Abstract

Faultlines are inherent to many workgroups, but the literature has not fully explained what faultlines mean for team functioning. In this study, we investigate the curvilinear relationship between faultlines and team performance from a cross-categorization perspective. Analyses of multisource data obtained from 61 workgroups located in China support an inverted U-shaped relationship between faultlines and team performance. Additionally, we find that this curvilinear relationship is moderated by a team’s climate of psychological safety such that the curvilinear relationship is more pronounced among teams with a weaker psychological safety climate. The findings contribute to elaborating the nature of and advancing a contingency view of the relationship between faultlines and team performance. Theoretical implications are discussed along with possible limitations and directions for future research.

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Notes

  1. Lau and Murnighan (1998) noted that groups will have no faultlines when they are completely homogeneous. Although this situation is possible in theory, the authors argued that it is unusual for workgroups to have members with completely similar demographic attributes in practice. Thus, we do not consider the extreme situation of no faultlines because the group is entirely homogeneous.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Zhenxiong Chen, Zhaoli Song and Chuding Ling for their helpful comments on early drafts of this paper. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71502162), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. LQ14G020010), and the Soft Science Research Program of Zhejiang Province (Grant No. 2016C25015).

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  1. College of Business Administration, Zhejiang University of Finance & Economics, Hangzhou, 310018, China

    Shuai Chen & Daoyou Wu

  2. School of Management, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China

    Duanxu Wang & Yun Zhou

  3. College of Business, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, 999077, China

    Ziguang Chen

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  1. Shuai Chen
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Chen, S., Wang, D., Zhou, Y. et al. When too little or too much hurts: Evidence for a curvilinear relationship between team faultlines and performance. Asia Pac J Manag 34, 931–950 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-017-9510-7

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