Managing Conflict in Global Virtual Teams

All teams experience conflict, but conflict in a global virtual team can be more likely than in a traditional face-to-face hierarchical team.  This blog summarises an article that studied the causes of this additional conflict, and suggests ways to avoid conflict from these sources. See our more detailed guide on managing conflict.

Global Integration has identified five additional barriers to Global Virtual Team working – distance, cultures, time-zones, working through technology and working across organizational boundaries. We should expect more conflict than with traditional teams because these barriers create more opportunities for miscommunication and misunderstandings.

Kankanhalli, Tan and Wei studied conflict in global virtual teams populated by masters’ students who had been tasked with undertaking a global virtual project.  Their study, presented in the Journal of Management Systems, is therefore somewhat artificial, but it nevertheless sheds some interesting light on where this additional conflict can come from.

They found that three separate aspects of “National Culture” caused problems as follows:

• Broader cultural issues caused most cultural conflict.  “Broader Cultural Issues” means differences such as individual or group oriented cultures working together — (differences that we cover and summarise in the ‘cultural abacus’ we use in cross cultural training).We have also extended tis in our cross-functional team training to look at the impact of different functional cultures.
• Language problems were also responsible (both poor English ability, and sub-groups working in a language not understood by everyone).
• In addition, national differences (simply not liking another country and it’s culture) were the third factor.

Many organizations have worked hard to get culture “off the table” so that it is no longer an issue, and at Global Integration we know that there are three steps to achieving this and avoiding this potential source of conflict:

1. Recruit people who are open-minded about all cultures and not judgemental;
2. Recruit people with good skills in (usually) or provide training in whatever is your corporate language
3. Provide training on the broader cultural issues.

Functional Diversity also caused conflict, because of:

1. Differences in priorities;
2. Differing assumptions made;
3. Different levels of knowledge and understanding.

At Global Integration, we have some key tools and tips to help with this in our global leadership training.  But it is also important to know that some of these sources of conflict (for example priority clashes) are a feature of complex teams, so we have to learn to live with them and the conflict they create.

Finally Technology caused conflict too due to two factors: –

1. Large volumes of communication (made possible by email) leading to information overload and people simply missing the important stuff.
2. Misunderstandings caused by a lack of immediacy of feedback or response

These are problems shared by many of our remote and virtual team programme participants.

Source: Conflict and Performance in Global Virtual Teams Kankanhalli, Atreyi; Tan, Bernard C.Y.; and Wei, Kwok-Kee. Journal of Management Information Systems Vol. 23 No. 3, Winter 2007 pp. 237 – 274

See more on managing conflict in a matrix organization.