Task Conflict and Voice Behavior: A Curvilinear Relationship

Research suggests that moderate levels of task conflict encourage team members to share ideas, generate creative insights, and voice recommendations to improve team performance. This line of reasoning implies that task conflict would exhibit an inverted-U association with voice behavior, such that team members are more likely to engage in voice at moderate levels of task conflict. Drawing from research on voice and issue selling, we propose that moderate levels of task conflict are associated with the highest levels of image risk associated with voice, thus producing a regular-U relationship with voice behavior. In addition, consistent with social information processing theory, the association between task conflict and image risk is moderated by relational conflict, such that the curvilinear association is weaker when relational conflict is lower. Results based on 195 employees from 79 teams working in a pipeline industry supported our hypotheses. Supplementary analyses further show that task conflict exhibits an inverted-U relationship with team performance, as past research suggests, but this relationship is not mediated by team voice behavior.