The effect of task conflict and cooperation on performance of teams: Are the results similar for different task types?

• Integration of team and conflict literature to analyze the relations between task conflict, cooperation and performance.
• Conceptualization of a research model to integrate task conflict as independent variable and team performance as dependent variable.
• Application of I-P-O frameworks to introduce cooperation as a mediating variable to examine its role between task conflict and performance.
• Split the sample into decision-choice and creative-generating tasks to see whether the outcome of the mediating chain depends on task type.

There is ample agreement in the literature that task conflict is an important predictor of team performance. Nevertheless, the question of “how and why” specifically task conflict affects performance still remains open and existing studies found positive, negative, as well as insignificant results when testing the relationship. Researchers argue that intra-team cooperation is a crucial process through which a team can improve its performance. Using team-conflict theory we argue that the effect of task conflict on performance is mediated by team member cooperation. In this paper, we thus intend to test this relationship using a sample of 92 team-task observations. We further split the sample into decision-choice and creative-generating tasks in order to see if the outcome of this mediating chain is the same for different task types. The results contribute to the understanding of the “black box” of team processes and are of relevance for practitioners as they provide evidence of a potential trigger to improve team performance