Linking social identities to intergroup behavior in diverse teams: the role of intergroup emotion

We apply Intergroup Emotion Theory – a theory that considers emotion as a group-based phenomenon - to argue that the way diverse team members cognitively appraise a situation (concerning relationships or the task at hand) and react emotionally about it, and the extent to which they intend to act on it or not, will be a function of their identification with a salient categorization. The proposed extension by applying IET offers the advantage of being able to predict more specifically when and why individual members in a diverse team may come to experience emotions on behalf of a shared salient social categorization (e.g. the team) potentially leading to shared emotions in the team, and when they will experience emotion on behalf of varied salient social categorizations (e.g. profession, gender, tenure), potentially leading to variation of emotions in the team. Essentially we argue that IET allows the integration of intergroup emotion as a key moderator in models of diverse teams that connect categorization and identification processes to team functioning. In this paper we elaborate propositions about the nature and role of intergroup emotion in diverse team functioning before discussing potential consequences of intergroup emotions for team information sharing.