I-Deals for Some Employees May (Not) Be Ideal for the Team: Positive and Negative Relationships Between I-Deals Differentiation and Team Effectiveness

Reflecting a more balanced employer–employee relationship in which employees have latitude to shape aspects of their employment, idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) are voluntary, personalized, nonstandard agreements that employees negotiate with their employers. In teams, i-deals differentiation (i-deals_D), the extent to which the degree of these arrangements varies across members, is a key form of HR differentiation. While research has largely emphasized its negative effects, we propose that the impact of i-deals_D on team effectiveness depends on the type of i-deals. We focus on career, flexibility, and task i-deals, the most common types of i-deals that employees across different jobs can negotiate with their manager. Drawing on social comparison theory, we argue that career and flexibility i-deals_D relate positively to team relationship conflict, and in turn associate with lower customer-related outcomes. In contrast, task i-deals_D relate negatively to team relationship conflict, and subsequently associate positively with customer-related outcomes. We test our model in two samples: a field study with three-source data collected from 59 stores of a national restaurant chain located in the United States (Study 1) and a field study with two-source data collected from 108 teams from three service companies located in China (Study 2). Across both studies, flexibility i-deals_D and task i-deals_D had a negative and a positive association, respectively, with team customer-related outcomes via team relationship conflict, while career i-deals_D was unrelated to our outcomes of interest. We advance the literatures on i-deals and HR differentiation, and offer practical insights into the implementation of i-deals_D in teams.