Researchers studying the dynamics of teams tend to focus on competition between demographic categories represented in a team, such as between men and women. But often two or more different professional categories, such as doctors or nurses, are required to work together as a unit. How do the dynamics change?

Prof. Prithviraj Chattopadhyay of HKUST and his co-authors suggest the different status of these categories means they do not compete with each other - in fact, they accept their differences as stable and legitimate. But they are still not immune from the negative effects of conflict associated with competition, as the authors show in a study of 244 surgical team members from 17 hospitals in Australia.

In this case, the doctors are the higher status category and the more doctors there are on a team, the more likely they are to compete for top status among themselves. Such conflict can trigger negative emotions and behaviors, particularly for those who fare poorly, and this in turn affects others in the team and the team's overall performance.

The situation is different for members of the lower status group - here it is nurses - who are not likely to compete for status but instead try to collaborate with each other and ameliorate conflict. However, when they are working in a team with a larger number of doctors - a situation the authors call "professional dissimilarity" - it becomes more difficult for them to smooth out team conflict. They may even find themselves inadvertently caught up in the conflict as the surgeons may interpret their efforts as taking one side or another.

As the conflict is unchecked, it gives rise to more negative events and subsequently to negative emotions and behaviors, which may in turn affect work performance. The study focused on two types of negative events that are likely in mixed-status teams, accusations of professional incompetence and unprofessional conduct.

"Nurses in our sample were more likely to be accused of incompetence and exposed to unprofessional conduct by their colleagues when they faced higher levels of professional dissimilarity. Although their reticence to enact negative behaviors in response to these events resulted in a relatively low frequency of such behaviors in our sample, the potential that such behaviors could cause harm to patients nevertheless underscores the importance of studying this relationship," the authors say.

Overall, accusations of unprofessional conduct were more likely to give rise to more negative emotions and behavior than accusations of incompetence for both surgeons and nurses. "We speculate that although professionals realize that even very competent team members may make a few mistakes, it is never acceptable to be treated unprofessionally," they say.

The results suggest managers of diverse teams need to be aware that having two or more categories in a team does not necessarily lead to competition between the categories and associated negative relationships within the team as a whole. However, there could be competition within categories and managers need to pay attention to this.

The findings should have application in other teams in which status hierarchies are legitimate, stable and impermeable, such as commercial flight crews, technical service teams and mental health treatment teams. The authors say that as with surgical teams, they expect higher status members to compete among themselves such that higher professional similarity will result in negative outcomes, while the opposite should happen with lower status members who benefit from greater similarity, that is, working on teams with more people like themselves.