Virtual and Standard Teams Differ in Types, Effects of Conflict

Studies indicate that "virtual" or "distributed" teams—those made up of people in different locations—have more conflicts than "co-located" teams of people in the same location. Hoping to jump start research into why this is, two researchers in Stanford's Center for Work, Technology and Organization analyzed what we know about virtual teams and team conflicts and came up with a number of theories. In virtual teams, the authors propose:

• Conflicts over tasks ("what to do") are higher because these teams tend to have higher diversity and differences in perspective and norms.
• Personal conflicts go up for the same reasons, plus the difficulty of establishing a good working rhythm when separated by time and distance.
• Process conflicts ("how to do it") go up because of the lack of rhythm and unfamiliarity with each other.
• Task conflicts are more likely to cause personal conflicts in virtual than standard teams because trust is harder to build when you don't interact often with someone frequently.
• Having to coordinate via technology instead of personal contact increases all three types of conflict because some information (such as emotions) aren't conveyed as well, and because important information is less likely to get distributed to everyone who needs it when needed.
• Although the right kind of task conflict can improve team performance in standard teams (if needed to stimulate debate), it always hurts virtual teams because of the additional difficulties of resolving conflict electronically.

Virtual teams, the article says, reduce the effect of distance and technology limitations by:

• Meeting face-to-face, preferably early in the team's life span and again at critical junctures such as work hand-offs.
• Conveying more personal, emotional, and contextual information by e-mail and phone than they would with people they saw regularly.
• Adopting a single team identity and similar norms (team rules and procedures, work processes, etc.) across locations.
• Learning about the limitations of technology and how to overcome them, including gaining greater expertise with the technology (such as collaboration software) than standard teams bother to get.
• Learning and practicing methods for facing and solving conflicts as a group despite the limitations of technology.

Source: Hinds, P., and D. Bailey (03), "Out of Sight, Out of Sync: Understanding Conflict in Distributed Teams," Organization Science 14(6):615.