Behind the Scenes: Perceptions and Management of Conflict in Teams with Varying Levels of Virtuality and National Diversity

This study explores how individuals perceive and manage conflict in various team settings employing different degrees of virtuality and national diversity through a mixed-methods approach using 223 surveys and 23 semi-structured interviews of participants who completed a computer-based simulation. Utilizing the model of individualized conceptualization of conflict, the study found that individual and contextual factors play crucial roles together and shape team dynamics and conflict. The quantitative findings indicate that virtuality negatively influences team performance scores and highlight that individuals in fully virtual, highly diverse teams report the highest perceptions of conflict presence compared to other teams. The qualitative examination supports such findings by demonstrating that individuals in virtual team settings engaged in self-censorship behaviors that may contribute to conflict-related challenges. It also found that individual differences in cultural awareness, previous experience, personalities, leadership, and conflict management skills interplay with contextual factors, influencing and shaping how individuals perceive, conceptualize, and manage conflict. These interactions were discussed in relation to the study's statistically insignificant findings and their potential implications for the inconsistent findings of previous studies examining the role of virtuality and national diversity in team dynamics and conflict. This study advances the current understanding of conflict in multinational virtual teams by highlighting the importance of including individual-level data in understanding team conflict. It also makes a unique contribution by showing the benefits of employing the mixed-methods experimental design that provides a complete picture of team conflict and allows for a comparison of the varying degrees of virtuality and national diversity.