Ann C. Mooney

Don't Take it Personally: Exploring Cognitive Conflict as a Mediator of Affective Conflict

Research has sought to explain the multi-dimensionality of conflict and its paradoxical effects on decision making (Amason, 1996; DeDreu and Weingart, 2003; Jehn, 1995). The primary prescription to emerge from this work has been for teams to seek the benefits of cognitive (task) conflict while simultaneously avoiding the costs of affective (emotional) conflict. The problem is that these two types of conflict often occur together and researchers have offered few explanations as to why this happens or guidance as to how it can be avoided. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that cognitive conflict can contribute to affective conflict. As a result, by encouraging cognitive conflict, teams may inadvertently provoke affective conflict. We provide evidence that behavioural integration can mitigate this tendency. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2007.

Core Competence, Distinctive Competence, and Competitive Advantage: What Is the Difference?

Core competence, distinctive competence, and competitive advantage are 3 of the most important business concepts that managers, researchers, and educators rely on for decision making, pedagogy, and research. However, little attention has been paid to defining these concepts. As a result, they have become buzzwords that are used so frequently that their meanings are often taken for granted but are not fully understood. In this article, the author reviews the evolution of these concepts in business literature and provides comprehensive definitions, conceptual models, and examples to help clarify and distinguish the concepts so that failures of communication can be avoided.

The Icarus paradox revisited: how strong performance sows the seeds of dysfunction in future strategic decision-making

This article reports on two studies that examine the relationship between performance and strategic issue-framing and decision-processing.The results suggest strong performance promotes a defensive mindset that may lead to dysfunctional outcomes. Study 1 draws its data from 51 CEOs and shows that performance is associated with framing issues as threats rather than opportunities. Study 2 draws its data from 45 top management teams and shows that performance is associated with less comprehensiveness in decision-making. Implications of these findings provide insights into why organizations that perform well sometimes squander their success subsequently through poor decision-making.

Virtuality and Media Synchronicity: Their Effects on Conflict in Virtual Teams

Past research has provided evidence that teams who are able to gain the benefits of the task conflict but avoid the pitfalls of relationship conflict should perform better than they would if they let relationship conflict occur. The problem is that task conflict has a tendency to trigger relationship conflict, making it difficult for teams to gain the benefits of task conflict without also incurring the costs of relationship conflict. Researchers have offered mechanisms by which teams can keep conflict task oriented, but this research has been focused on face-to-face, non-virtual teams. Little is still known about how task and relationship conflict can be managed in a virtual environment.In this paper, we argue that virtuality influences the relationship between task and relationship conflict by the manner in which it relates to two factors – trust and behavioral integration. Based largely on social influence processes, we hypothesize that when teams communicate more virtually (e.g., use ICTs that are less rich and more asynchronous), it is more difficult for them to develop trustworthiness (and therefore trust) and behavioral integration. Lacking trust and behavioral integration, virtual teams should then be more likely to make misattributions about task conflict, which leads to greater relationship conflict. In other words, we propose that virtuality makes managing task and relationship conflict even more difficult. This effect, however, we argue can be avoided when teams have strong experience with the media and with working together.