Understanding Conflict in Geographically Distributed Teams: The Moderating Effects of Shared Identity, Shared Context, and Spontaneous Communication
نویسندگان
چکیده
Geographically distributed teams are increasingly prevalent in the workplace, and research on distributed teams is ever more available. Despite this increased attention, we still know surprisingly little about how the dynamics of distributed teams differ from those of their collocated counterparts and how existing models of teams apply to this new form of work. For example, although it has been argued that distributed as compared with collocated teams have more severe conflicts that fester longer and resist resolution, few comparative studies investigate dynamics such as conflict in both distributed and collocated teams. In this study, we examine conflict, its antecedents, and its effects on performance in distributed as compared with collocated teams. Our goal is to understand how conflict plays out in distributed and collocated teams, thus providing insight into how existing models of conflict must be augmented to reflect the trend toward distributed work. We report the results of a field study of 43 teams, 22 collocated and 21 distributed, from a large multinational company. As expected, the distributed teams reported more task and interpersonal conflict than did the collocated teams. We found evidence that shared identity moderated the effect of distribution on interpersonal conflict and that shared context moderated the effect of distribution on task conflict. Finally, we found that spontaneous communication played a pivotal role in the relationship between distribution and conflict. First, spontaneous communication was associated with a stronger shared identity and more shared context, our moderating variables. Second, spontaneous communication had a direct moderating effect on the distribution-conflict relationship, mitigating the effect of distribution on both types of conflict. We argue that this effect reflects the role of spontaneous communication in facilitating conflict identification and conflict handling.
منابع مشابه
Group Atmosphere, Shared Understanding, and Perceived Conflict in Virtual Teams: Findings from an Experiment
In this paper, we present a theoretical model on the relationships among group atmosphere, shared understanding, and perceived task conflict in virtual teams. We validate the theoretical model by analyzing data that was collected in a laboratory experiment on virtual teams. We find that cultural diversity of virtual team adversely affects group atmosphere and group atmosphere has a positive inf...
متن کاملOut of Sight, Out of Sync: Understanding Conflict in Distributed Teams
The bulk of our understanding of teams is based on traditional teams in which all members are collocated and communicate face to face. However, geographically distributed teams, whose members are not collocated and must often communicate via technology, are growing in prevalence. Studies from the field are beginning to suggest that geographically distributed teams operate differently and experi...
متن کاملVirtual team collaboration: building shared meaning, resolving breakdowns and creating translucence
Managing international teams with geographically distributed participants is a complex task. The risk of communication breakdowns increases due to cultural and organizational differences grounded in the geographical distribution of the participants. Such breakdowns indicate general misunderstandings and a lack of shared meaning between participants. In this paper, we address the complexity of b...
متن کاملModeling the Antecedents of Perceived Performance in Partially Distributed Teams
Global distributed teams are increasingly common as organizations collaborate in the global economy. Partially distributed teams are often formed to gather expertise from different locations to accomplish the organizational goals. A PDT is a team in which there is at least one collocated subteam which is geographically distant from other subteams and communicates with the other subteams through...
متن کاملExpanding the Bandwidth of Virtual Teams Via a Shared Social Construction
Computer-mediated communication systems (CMC) offer alternative means of communication within and across organisational contexts. Collaboration between virtual teams which meet via computer-mediated technologies, often takes place in a context where the teams are geographically distributed and the members in the teams have not met in a face-to-face meeting. In this context promoting effective c...
متن کامل