motivated parties, fostered more accommodating, more problem solving, more compromising, and less forcing, resulting in more de-escalation or less escalation of conflict (Janssen & Van de Vliert, 1996). Dominance turned out to be directly related to participants’ motivation and conflict behavior; it did not moderate the effects of interdependence on motivation and conflict behavior. When, soon my graduation there was a vacancy for a PhD position at the University of Groningen, supervised by Evert and Ben Emans, I decided to apply and got the job. The purpose of the project was to examine the role of interdependence in organizational work teams, building on the work of Kelly and Thibaut (1978). It soon turned out that it was difficult to directly apply their work in real-life work teams. Interdependence structures in work teams are messy and the concepts of reflexive control, fate control, and behavioral control are hard to operationalize in a field study. We therefore decided to distinguish between task and outcome interdependence as two basic forms of interdependence that can be distinguished in work groups. Task interdependence refers to the extent to which group members must exchange information and resources or actually work together to complete their jobs. Outcome interdependence is the degree to which the significant outcomes an individual receives depend on the performance of others; this is to a large extent determined by the team’s goals, the way team members receive feedback, and are rewarded for their performance. We noticed that several studies had already examined the role of task and outcome interdependence for team effectiveness, but that little was known about how group members affectively respond to intragroup interdependence. We set out to study this relationship in a series of field studies. In a first study (Van der Vegt, Emans, & Van de Vliert, 1998), we developed scales to measure task and outcome interdependence and collected data from a sample of police officers. The results showed that task and outcome interdependence explained variance in
motivated parties, fostered more accommodating, more problem solving, more compromising, and less forcing, resulting in more de-escalation or less escalation of conflict (Janssen & Van de Vliert, 1996). Dominance turned out to be directly related to participants’ motivation and conflict behavior; it did not moderate the effects of interdependence on motivation and conflict behavior. When, soon my graduation there was a vacancy for a PhD position at the University of Groningen, supervised by Evert and Ben Emans, I decided to apply and got the job. The purpose of the project was to examine the role of interdependence in organizational work teams, building on the work of Kelly and Thibaut (1978). It soon turned out that it was difficult to directly apply their work in real-life work teams. Interdependence structures in work teams are messy and the concepts of reflexive control, fate control, and behavioral control are hard to operationalize in a field study. We therefore decided to distinguish between task and outcome interdependence as two basic forms of interdependence that can be distinguished in work groups. Task interdependence refers to the extent to which group members must exchange information and resources or actually work together to complete their jobs. Outcome interdependence is the degree to which the significant outcomes an individual receives depend on the performance of others; this is to a large extent determined by the team’s goals, the way team members receive feedback, and are rewarded for their performance. We noticed that several studies had already examined the role of task and outcome interdependence for team effectiveness, but that little was known about how group members affectively respond to intragroup interdependence. We set out to study this relationship in a series of field studies. In a first study (Van der Vegt, Emans, & Van de Vliert, 1998), we developed scales to measure task and outcome interdependence and collected data from a sample of police officers. The results showed that task and outcome interdependence explained variance in
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