Understanding Conflict in Geographically Distributed Teams

• Main Authors: Hui-Hu Kuo, 郭蕙瑜
• Other Authors: Huey-Wen Chou
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2006
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/16345703538054659787

碩士 === 國立中央大學 === 資訊管理研究所 === 94 === Because of the trend of globalization and the development of Internet, distributed work teams become the main operating units to achieve a competitive advantage in such business environment. In this study, we aim to figure out the relationship between geographically different team types and conflict, as well as possible mediating and moderating factors that could influence this relationship. We report the results on the survey data from 106 teams, including 55 distributed teams and 51 collocated teams across various industries. Our results suggest that geographically distributed teams, compared with collocated teams, experienced less trust among team members. Lower trust among team members leaded to higher group conflict. This study found that trust among team members was a significant mediating factor between geographically different team types and conflict. In addition, shared identity significantly moderated the geographically different team types – interpersonal conflict relationship, suggesting that shared identity may help distributed teams to reduce group conflict. The managerial implications in teamwork in geographically distributed teams and research limitations of this study will be discussed at the end of this paper.