10.1177/1046496403251634 ARTICLE SMALL GROUP RESEARCH / June 2003 Bayazit, Mannix / SHOULD I STAY? SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO? Predicting Team Members’ Intent to Remain in the Team MAHMUT BAYAZIT New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations Cornell University ELIZABETH A. MANNIX Johnson Graduate School of Management Cornell University The authors examined team demographic diversity, perceived team efficacy, intrateam con- flict, and perceived team performance as predictors of members’intentions to remain in their team, a form of behavioral commitment. Eighty-three second-year MBA students randomly assigned to 28 three-person teams participated in a negotiation simulation. As hypothesized, results from HLM analysis showed team relationship conflict but not task conflict mediated the relationship of age and national diversity with members’ intent to remain. Individual members’ initial perceptions of their team’s negotiation efficacy and negotiation perfor- mance were also found to predict their intent to remain as a team member, but team perfor- mance did not mediate the team efficacy–intent-to-remain relationship. Hypotheses predict- ing that team relationship conflict moderates the relationship of team efficacy with intent to remain and team performance were not supported. Keywords: intent to remain; efficacy; conflict; diversity One of the inevitable consequences of being a member of a team is the intention to remain or leave the team. Intention to remain a member of a unit is considered a form of behavioral commitment (Mottaz, 1989) and has been shown to be directly related to actual 290 AUTHORS’NOTE: A previous version of this article was presented in April 2001 at the 16th annual conference of Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology in San Diego, California. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Mahmut Bayazit, Department of Organizational Behavior, NYSSILR, Cornell University, 379 Ives Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853; e-mail: mb124@cornell.edu. SMALL GROUP RESEARCH, Vol. 34 No. 3, June 2003 290-321 DOI: 10.1177/1046496403251634 © 2003 Sage Publications