Making Conflict Productive

Given these theoretical frameworks and empirical examples, how can organizations enhance the likelihood that diverse teams can experience “process gains including increased creativity, a productive blend of local and global know-how, the ability to make high stakes decisions under considerable uncer­tainty, and the capacity to create a richer range of options?” (McGrath, 1984).

Research suggests that these process gains happen not when there isn’t any conflict but rather when it is constructive. In con­structive conflict, team members develop a better awareness of themselves and others, learn about what differences make a dif­ference between and among cultures and nation-states, and how often similar things are expressed differently (Behfar, Peterson, Mannix, & Trochim, 2008). In such cases, cultural differences are brought to the surface without rancor.

Productive conflicts enable team mem­bers to learn about, learn from, and most important learn with others from other cul­tures. Constructive conflict can develop more positive working relationships. When people accomplish something together, tensions are reduced and future interactions are positively anticipated. Morale is improved, satisfaction is increased, and productivity may improve based on greater motivation and knowledge about the other. Table 27.2 shows both the positive and negative effects.

Strategies for Dealing With Conflict in Transnational Teams

Addressing the many types of global tensions presented in this chapter, Brett, Behfar, and Kern (2006) identify four distinct types of intervention strategies. These strategies are (1) adaption, (2) structural intervention, (3) managerial intervention, and (4) exit. Adaption is the least disruptive approach, where members make adjustments to accom­modate one another.

Table 27.2 Potential Outcomes of Conflict

The locus of conflict clearly influences which strategies are most effective.

Being able to suspend judgment and use one’s senses to register all the ways that the team personalities are different from those in one’s home culture (yet are also similar to one another) can also be an important com­ponent of adapting and mitigating multicul­tural team conflict (Earley & Mosakowski, 2004). This heightened sense of adaptation represents a crucial component of cultural intelligence (CI). Team members (or manag­ers) with high CI are able to understand how to encounter new cultural situations and judge what goes on in them. They can thus make appropriate adjustments to under­stand and behave effectively, and poten­tially can lead teams to constructive (vs. destructive) conflict (Earley & Ang, 2003). Developing a global mind-set represents another way to approach leadership and teamwork in a more culturally sensitive manner. Exploratory and confirmatory fac­tor analyses indicate three components of the global mind-set: (1) intellectual capital, (2) social capital, and (3) psychological capi­tal (Javidan & Teagarden, 2011).

In the case when clear subgroups within the team are supported by negative stereotypes that dominate the interaction, Brett and her colleagues (2006) recommend a structural intervention, perhaps a deliberate reorganiza­tion that removes the source of conflict that overly disrupts or misdirects the interaction.

Successful managers report using all four strategies to manage conflict, though there is general agreement that adaption is more likely to have long-term as well as short-term payoffs. Choosing appropriate strategies for addressing conflict, however, is further complicated by differences in procedural preferences and per­ceptions of justice in the workplace (Triandis, Bontempo, Villareal, Asai, & Lucca, 1988).

Research indicates that high power dis­tance participants display a greater preference for court and mediation procedures than low power distance participants ( Sivasubramaniam & Goodman-Delahunty, 2008). For many in Asian cultures, justice is achieved via compro­mise as opposed to some of the more adver­sarial procedures frequently reported in the West (Gulliver, 1979). Chinese participants prefer mediation more than American par­ticipants (Leung, 1987), the same difference is found when Japanese are compared with Spanish, Dutch, and Canadian employees (French & Weis, 2000).

Workers in low power distance countries also rely on and prefer their own training and experiences to resolve a work group conflict to intervention by a supervisor ( P. B. Smith, Dugan, Peterson, & Leung, 1998), while Chinese exec­utives are more likely than Canadian executives to consult their superiors when facing a conflict situation (Tse, Francis, & Walls, 1994). These different cultural preferences are clearly impor­tant when choosing the appropriate interven­tion at the team level, but as we shall see in the next section, preferential differences in procedural and operational justice also have important implications as conflict moves to the macro-interorganizational level.