We review the new and growing body of work on power in teams and use this review to develop an emergent theory of how power impacts team outcomes. Our paper offers three primary contributions. First, our review highlights potentially incorrect assumptions that have arisen around the topic of power in teams and documents the areas and findings that appear most robust in explaining the effects of power on teams. Second, we contrast the findings of this review with what is known about the effects of power on individuals and highlight the directionally oppositional effects of power that emerge across different levels of analysis. Third, we integrate findings across levels of analysis into an emergent theory which explains why and when the benefits of power for individuals may paradoxically explain the potentially negative effects of power on team outcomes. We elaborate on how individual social comparisons within teams where at least one member has power increase intra-team power sensitivity, which we define as a state in which team members are excessively perceptive of, affected by, and responsive to resources. We theorize that when power-sensitized teams experience resource threats (either stemming from external threats or personal threats within the team), these threats will ignite internal power sensitivities and set into play performance-detracting intra-team power struggles. This conflict account of power in teams integrates and organizes past findings in this area to explain why and when power negatively affects team-level outcomes, and opens the door for future research to better understand why and when power may benefit team outcomes when power’s dark side for teams is removed.

我们回顾了团队中关于权力的新的和不断增长的工作，并使用此评论来发展关于权力如何影响团队成果的新兴理论。我们的论文提供了三个主要贡献。首先，我们的回顾突出了围绕团队权力主题出现的潜在错误假设，并记录了在解释权力对团队影响方面最有力的领域和发现。其次，我们将本次审查的结果与关于权力对个人的影响的已知情况进行对比，并强调了在不同分析水平上出现的权力的定向对立作用。第三，我们将各种分析水平的发现整合到一个新兴理论中，该理论解释了权力的好处以及为什么会给个人带来反常的解释，从而解释权力对团队成果的潜在负面影响。我们将详细说明至少有一个成员拥有权力的团队内部的个体社会比较如何提高团队内部权力的敏感性，我们将其定义为团队成员过度感知，受资源影响和对资源做出反应的状态。我们认为，当对权力敏感的团队遇到资源威胁时（无论是来自外部威胁还是团队内部的人为威胁），这些威胁将激发内部权力敏感性，并导致降低绩效的团队内部权力斗争。