Learning a Generalizable Model of Team Conflict from Multiparty Dialogues

Good communication is indubitably the foundation of effective teamwork. Over time teams develop their own communication styles and often exhibit entrainment, a conversational phenomena in which humans synchronize their linguistic choices. Conversely, teams may experience conflict due to either personal incompatibility or differing viewpoints. We tackle the problem of predicting team conflict from embeddings learned from multiparty dialogues such that teams with similar post-task conflict scores lie close to one another in vector space. Embeddings were extracted from three types of features: (1) dialogue acts, (2) sentiment polarity, and (3) syntactic entrainment. Machine learning models often suffer domain shift; one advantage of encoding the semantic features is their adaptability across multiple domains. To provide intuition on the generalizability of different embeddings to other goal-oriented teamwork dialogues, we test the effectiveness of learned models trained on the Teams corpus on two other datasets. Unlike syntactic entrainment, both dialogue act and sentiment embeddings are effective for identifying team conflict. Our results show that dialogue act-based embeddings have the potential to generalize better than sentiment and entrainment-based embeddings. These findings have potential ramifications for the development of conversational agents that facilitate teaming.

The Effect of Diversity towards Team Conflict and How Emotional Intelligence Role as Moderating Variable in Improving Team Performance: A Theoretical Study

This article is a literature review that discusses the effect of diversity on the occurrence of team conflict and how emotion al intelligence role as a moderating variable to improve team performance. Diversity may trigger relationship conflicts within the team that affect their performance. However, not all diversity has a negative impact if the organization concerned can create a cohesiv e team. Team members with higher levels of expertise on the team should be given more influence over team processes and outcomes. Organizational support and openness have different effects on the relationship of diversity to the occurrence of conflict within the organiz ation. The emotional intelligence of team members was found to play an important role in reducing the negative effects that might be trigg ered by diversity. Emotionally intelligent team members are generally more capable of dealing with differences. Thus, they are more aware of the creative potential of their different thoughts, values, and beliefs. In conclusion, one of the efforts to improve team performance is to reduce or prevent conflicts within the team through emotional intelligence.

Differentiated transformational leadership, conflict and team creativity: an experimental study in China

Purpose The authors investigated the impacts of differentiated transformational leadership (TFL), including team-focused TFL and individual-focused TFL, on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict, consisting of task conflict and relationship conflict.Design/methodology/approach The authors designed and conducted a close-to-reality experiment, enrolling 180 students and six professors from a large Chinese university. Student participants worked on a real marketing project and professor participants imitated the behaviors of transformational leaders. Using the computed values of team-focused TFL, individual-focused TFL, team creativity, task conflict and relationship conflict, the authors assessed the relationship among differentiated TFL, team creativity and team conflict.Findings Team-focused TFL has a significantly positive impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of task conflict, whereas individual-focused TFL has a significantly negative impact on team creativity through the mediating effect of relationship conflict.Originality/value From a new perspective of team conflict, the authors revealed the “black box” of the differentiated TFL–team creativity relationship. Moreover, other determinants were well controlled in the experiment, and thus, the authors effectively clarified the intervening mechanism of differentiated TFL on team creativity through the mediating effect of team conflict.

The relation between project team conflict and user resistance in software projects

This study aims to explore the relation between conflict in the project team and user resistance to change in software projects. Following a cross-sectional research design, a survey was conducted among 1,000 largest companies in Slovenia (N = 114). The results of PLS-SEM analysis indicate that task and process conflicts in the project team are associated with user resistance. This study is among the first to associate conflict within the project team and user resistance in the implementing organization. It is also one of the first studies to investigate the relations between different types of conflict and user resistance. Project managers may invest resources into adequately managing conflicts within the project team related to tasks in which the project team interacts with users of developed software to lower user resistance. Project with poorly defined roles (e.g., agile and information security projects) may be more prone to user resistance than projects with clearly defined roles.

Servant Leadership Stimulates Spiritual Well-Being Through Team Trust in a Female Religious Context

This study investigates how female religious leaders nurture spiritual well-being in religious sisters. Specifically, we examined how servant leadership fosters spiritual well-being [Gifts and Fruits of the Spirit (GFSp)] through, respectively, the mediating role of team trust and reduced occurrence of team conflicts. Quantitative survey data were collected from 453 religious sisters (followers) within a Catholic Women Religious Institute in Nigeria. Using structural equation modeling, results showed that servant leadership is positively related to team trust and negatively related to team conflict. Further findings showed that servant leadership indirectly fosters spiritual well-being: Gifts of the Spirit (GSp), and Fruits of the Spirit (FSp), through the mediating role of team trust, however not through reduced team conflict. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Entrepreneurial Team Conflict and Cohesion: Meta-structural Equation Modeling

We explore the mediating effects that entrepreneurial team conflict and cohesion have on the relationship between team diversity and performance based on an inputs-mediators-outcomes framework. Using 56 samples from 54 empirical studies, we conducted a meta-analysis of the hypothesized relationships and used meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM) to test the mediating models. Our findings reveal that team diversity was related to cognitive and affective conflict, and only affective conflict was associated with objective and subjective venture performance. Furthermore, entrepreneurial team cohesion had positive effects on venture performance. Our unique contributions to the entrepreneurial team literature and future research suggestions are also discussed.