Getting along long-distance: understanding conflict in a multinational team through network analysis

Getting along long-distance: understanding conflict in a multinational team through network analysis
Author(s): Labianca, Giuseppe and Joshi, Aparna and Caligiuri, Paula
Year: 2002
Paper Number: gbs-om-2002-004
Goizueta Department: Organization and Management

Abstract

Multinational companies (MNCs) create international teams to pool global talent and meet organizational goals. But the many differences between team members are fertile ground for conflict. While traditional conflict management techniques gather all team members together to resolve or minimize conflicts, geographic dispersion greatly increases the time, money, and disruption to daily workflow activities necessary to bring multinational teams together. We use a social network perspective to identify and prioritize conflicts to increaes team effectiveness, allowing management to focus on the most critical conflicts first. Further, we show that the most critical conflict might not be between headquarters and country subsidiaries, but between two country subsidiaries.