Coping with intragroup conflict

Abstract

Conflicts are typically considered stressful and therefore can elicit strong physiological reactions such as increases in heart rate or blood pressure. Thus far, surprisingly little research attention has been paid to how psychophysiological stress responses affect the way conflicts are managed. In this chapter we address this issue and focus specifically on intragroup conflicts. To that end, we first review the intragroup conflict literature, concluding that groups tend to be hurt by relationship and process conflict, but may benefit from task conflict under certain circumstances. Next, we discuss four studies in which we applied the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat (BPSM; for ..