Understanding the Link between Conflict Profiles and Team Affective Outcomes Using LPA and NLP techniques

Team conflict is a naturally emerging phenomenon resulting from individuals' interactions during project execution. Cross-disciplinary teams can experience higher levels of conflict than single-discipline teams because of the increased diversity of knowledge and perspectives. Research has shown that team conflict can emerge from different types of disagreements (cognitive and interpersonal), which have different implications for team functioning. Past empirical research has focused on the impact of both conflict types independent from each other while overlooking their combined effects. This work examines the conflict profiles resulting from the combined levels of interpersonal and cognitive disagreements and their association with team outcomes. The study had two primary goals. The first was to identify emerging team conflict patterns by adopting the conflict state profiles approach. The second was to examine the differences in four affective outcomes across the conflict profiles. The latent profile analysis (LPA) results revealed three conflict profile categories. Statistical comparisons and sentiment analysis indicated that cross-disciplinary teams with different patterns of co-existing conflict types varied significantly in their task attraction, task commitment, levels of satisfaction, and sentiment about the team experience. This study advances the examination of conflict states in cross-disciplinary teams through a methodological approach that combines traditional measures with a natural language processing (NLP) technique to assess the affective component of teamwork. The findings provide insight into the relationship between conflict profiles and team functioning that can be used to develop tools and strategies to prevent and manage conflict.