Bridging between Conflict and Organizational Politics in Teams: A Structured Review.

Modern business decisions have become increasingly complex, making cross-functional integration an enabler but also a challenge for decision-making teams. Diverse functional priorities create open conflict and trigger covert political tactics. Yet, we know little about the connection between such conflict and organizational politics in decision-making teams. Therefore, we conduct a structured literature review to delineate the status of research and to connect these two literature streams more thoroughly in the future. In a thematic analysis of 134 publications, we identify 10 themes that represent ongoing discussions, debates, and trends within and between conflict and politics research. Our findings show that team conflict research is diverse and overall well-developed, while the team-focus is meaningful but scarce in research on organizational politics. Instead, politics studies focus on the individual within a departmental or firm context and study mostly individual-related phenomena, such as emotions or withdrawal. We map out how research on conflict and politics can enhance their mutual understanding and study the reciprocal effects on one another based on a concluding framework depicting existing knowledge on causes and effects of organizational politics, conflict and their interconnectedness. Our main contribution is a comprehension of the advances and uncovered spots in team conflict and politics literature, which is channeled into a selection of specific ideas for future inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]