Stephen J. Sauer

Conflict and Creativity in Interdisciplinary Teams

We examine the effects of conflict and conflict asymmetry on creativity in interdisciplinary teams. Testing our hypotheses on teams working on graduate-level nanobiotechnology projects, we found task conflict to have a positive relationship with creativity whereas relationship conflict had a negative relationship with creativity. Our results also revealed that relationship conflict asymmetry had a positive effect on creativity. Examining the two components of creativity separately, we found that relationship conflict asymmetry explained variance in the novelty component, whereas task conflict, team size, and functional diversity explained variance in the usefulness component.

Status and Power in Organizational Group Research: Acknowledging the Pervasiveness of Hierarchy

Within the organizational literature, the emphasis on group performance has tended to overshadow issues of group composition and structure. In this chapter we urge group scholars to turn their attention to the topic of hierarchy in organizational groups. We focus on hierarchy as defined by both status and power. We propose that understanding how organizational groups resolve conflicts, make decisions, and ultimately perform, must stem from an understanding of the hierarchical structure in the team. Hierarchy imposes constraints on group interactions and should therefore be more central in our frameworks, theories, and research. We look at three areas that could benefit from bringing a hierarchical perspective to the forefront: (1) Information exchange and discussion biases in group decision making, (2) The study of conflict management and negotiation, and (3) Creativity and effectiveness in diverse teams.

Interactions Among Same-Status Peers Effects of Behavioral Style and Status Level

When can status peers—group members at the same status level whose relationship can often be characterized by competition and rivalry—experience more harmony than discord? In the current article, we focus on different behavioral styles and status level as joint predictors of interaction among status peers. Specifically, we posit and find that group members’ responses to varying behavioral styles exhibited by their status peers shape important group outcomes (i.e., the desire to continue working together and influence accepted from the peer), with the greatest sensitivity to peer behaviors enacted at the highest status levels. Implications for theories of status and influence in groups are discussed.

Recognizing Social Capital in Social Networks: Experimental Results

Social capital is an asset that has been positively linked to peoples positions in social networks (Burt, 1992). Yet, what allows some people to shift into these positions has received far less attention. We sought to fill this hole in the literature by offering socio-cognitive explanations for why and how some come to occupy critical positions while others do not. We proposed and found that self-construal - or how people view themselves in relation to their social world - affects peoples ability to learn and understand a novel social network. The greater peoples cognitive ability, the faster they learned the network. However, self-construal attenuated the effect; cognitive ability mattered for those who had a more independent (i.e., less relational) self-construal, but had no effect on learning for those who were more relational in their self-construal. Given more time, those higher in relational self-construal (RSC) developed more accurate perceptions of the status and power relations in the network. The same was not true of those who were low in RSC. We discuss the implications for peoples ability to spot opportunities for enhancing their social capital.

Beyond the playing field: the role of athletic participation in early career success

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how participation in varsity athletics during college affects career success in the first decade after graduation. The paper predicted that student-athletes would develop greater mentoring skills and emotional intelligence, leading to higher starting salaries as they enter the professional workforce and faster rates of salary growth as their careers progress. Design/methodology/approach – Cross-sectional nationwide survey study. Findings – The paper finds that former collegiate athletes score higher on measures of mentoring and emotional intelligence and have higher salaries through the first ten years of their careers than their non-athlete counterparts. The paper also finds that there are significant interaction effects for gender, such that male athletes score higher than male non-athletes on measures of mentoring and emotional intelligence, while female athletes score the same as non-athletes on these measures. Gender also impacted salary differences, such that at ...