Unpacking the You Versus Me in “Me”aningfulness: Calling, Effort Comparisons, and Conflict in Teams

Research Seminar

Management & Human Resources

Speaker: Kira Schabram

University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Bernard Ramanantsoa room

Abstract:

An emergent empirical record suggests that while called employees work hard and are recognized for it, they may not always work well with others. Through the lens of social comparison theory, we explore the equivocal impact of called employees on work team conflict. At the team-level, we predict that teams high in average calling will feature less conflict because of assimilative impulses while variance in team calling will fuel contrastive comparisons and conflict. To disentangle the dyadic microdynamics of this conflict, we predict that called employees will denigrate team members’ effort (i.e. engage in downward comparison), but be admired for their own (i.e. upward comparison). We test our model across three quantitative and one mixed-methods study encompassing 1,922 respondents (481 students and 1,441 working professionals). While all team level predictions are supported our dyadic insights are surprising: conflict in heterogenous teams is best predicted not by called employee’s downward social comparison but by others’ upward social comparison. In other words, team members seem to judge called employees as putting in too much effort and this drives conflict. Our work offers insights for the study of meaningful work, social comparison, as well as the potential impact of star performers.