Conflict, Diversity, and Faultlines in Workgroups

A growing body of research in organizational psychology has, in recent years, addressed the interplay between conflict, group composition (social category and informational diversity), and the effectiveness of organizational teams. This chapter will review and compare dispersion theories of group composition (e.g., heterogeneity) and alignment theories (e.g., faultline theory) as they explain group conflict (task conflict, relationship conflict, and process conflict). We do this by reviewing the typology of conflict types and focus, in addition to task and relationship conflict, on process conflict in workgroups. We then distinguish between dispersion theories of group composition (e.g., heterogeneity) and alignment theories (e.g., faultlines). We also delineate between the bases of group composition; that is, we distinguish diversity and alignment based on social category characteristics (e.g., race, gender, and age) and information-based characteristics (e.g., work experience and education). We propose that a better understanding of the various types of group diversity possible in teams