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

Abstract

Multinational companies (MNCs) create international teams to pool global talent and meet organizational goals. But the many differences among 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 increase 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.