Getting to the Heart of Conflict: Emotional Acknowledgment Reduces Negative Emotional Expression Intensity and Improves Intrateam Conflict Resolution

During mixed-motive intrateam conflicts, wherein members must balance cooperative and competitive motives, negative emotions such as anger and frustration often arise and derail effective conflict resolution. To help teams navigate this important challenge, we develop and test theory about how, why, and when responses to expressed emotions can enable effective resolution of intrateam conflict. While prior intrateam conflict research has shown that managing these emotions is critical for conflict resolution, the focus has been on broad conceptualizations of team emotion management that aggregate across both discrete emotion-response strategies with potentially divergent effects (e.g., acknowledgment, reframing, suppression) and different actors (e.g., members, leaders). This aggregation masks tensions and tradeoffs between different strategies and actors and offers team members limited guidance on how to respond to emotions during conflict. Therefore, responding to calls to focus on discrete emotion-response strategies, we identify emotional acknowledgment (i.e., the verbal recognition of another member’s emotional display) as a particularly effective strategy within intrateam conflicts because it simultaneously addresses cooperative motives by helping expressers feel seen and valued and competitive motives by creating an opportunity for expressers to advocate for their unique interests and priorities. We propose and find in two laboratory experiments of 496 three-person teams that emotional acknowledgment, particularly when coming from team leaders, reduces the intensity of negative emotional expression, thereby improving team conflict resolution.