An Examination of the Relationship Among Structure, Trust, and Conflict Management Styles in Virtual Teams

In today’s competitive environment, successful organizations that are able to utilize advanced information technology to establish a dynamic form to adapt to the ever-changing landscape and customer requirements always gain a competitive advantage in global competition (Porter & Lilly, 1996). The virtual team has become one of the building blocks of a successful organization. In this article, a virtual team is defined as ‘‘a group of people with complementary competencies executing simultaneous, collaborative work processes through electronic media without regard to geographic location’’ (Chinowsky & Rojas, 2003, p. 98). Virtual teams can offer a range of benefits to organizations, among them encouraging constructive dialogue and knowledge, nurturing a community of workers, triggering deeper processing of content through interaction, and offering flexible adaptation to complex tasks (Duarte & Snyder, 1999; Conrad & Donaldson, 2004; Palloff & Pratt, 2005; Lee, Bonk, Magjuka, Su, & Liu, 2006). However, a virtual team can also face challenges and issues that must be addressed for a successful team operation. From existing telework research, Workman, Kahnweiler, and Bommer (2001) summarize three attributes of virtual environments that are barriers to successful virtual collaboration: elevated ambiguity, increased isolation, and a less-structured environment. For example, in virtual environments lack of informal interactions, the constraints of dispersed asynchronous communication context, and limited capabilities of transmitting social