Avoiding Conflict in Project Teams Research Paper

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Conflict, Trust and Task Commitment on Project Team Performance by Porter and Lilly (1996). This article discusses the role that conflict plays in project team performance. The authors work with the hypothesis that conflict is a hindrance to project teams, even though it is sometimes felt to be a benefit to strategic teams. The underlying theory here is that project teams must quickly come to together and work towards a common goal. In many cases, the goal is already established, and the conflict therefore serves as little more than a distraction. Furthermore, there is less time to resolve a conflict in a project situation, and with a relatively short-term time horizon, there is less opportunity to resolve conflict via trade-offs or other forms of compromise.

The authors therefore are working with the idea that in project situations, it is best to avoid conflict altogether, or to deal with it immediately. This means focusing on rooting out the source of the conflict, and if that is an individual, perhaps removing the individual from the project team. Project teams must come together quickly, and be able to work quickly to resolve issues in order to maintain their schedule. It is critical, therefore, that the project team does not have major conflict. Managers therefore need to quickly intercede, and removing individuals at the heart of a conflict might ultimately prove to be a more effective approach than attempting to mediate, negotiate or otherwise address the conflict.

Other than that, the article does not talk about specific conflict management styles. The article is focused on what occurs when there is conflict in a project, and how management should view conflict in the project context, which is to try to minimize conflict as it is not nearly as beneficial as it may be at other times.

The authors in this article do not discuss the issue of concern for self. However, their explanation of the problems of conflict in project teams implies that they feel a low concern for self is the most important aspect of conflict resolution.

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Their writing implies that conflict, if driven by a high concern for oneself, is ultimately going to be detrimental to the project. The project requires that people on the project team are oriented towards achieving project success, and that concern for oneself should be reflected more in a desire for the project to perform well. Whereas in a non-project situation, conflict can be a valuable asset when used correctly to vet ideas and strategies, and where people often have motivation to have a higher concern for oneself, project performance is better when there is concern for the project, and less concern for oneself.

Concern for others should therefore be higher in a project, by the logic of the author's hypothesis. This is reasonable -- the concern should be directly mainly at the project, but where there is a project team, that should be reflected in a concern for the team as a whole. The more people are willing to set aside concern for themselves to help pick the team up, the better off the project will be. A project, they argue, needs to be more selfless than a non-project situation might be.

The second paper is Relationships among interpersonal conflict, requirements uncertainty, and software project performance by Julie Liu and Charlie Chen (2011). This article information systems projects specifically. The authors note that "interpersonal conflict and user requirements uncertainty are pervasive phenomena that plague information systems projects." They argue that a lot of interpersonal conflict in such projects actually reflects the uncertainty with respect to user requirements. In other words, the authors are arguing that disagreements among team members in this type of project often stem from uncertainty about what the customer wants, and that leads to task uncertainty among the people working on the project. Because people are not in agreement with what they are supposed to be doing, there is a lot of task confusion. This….....

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