Structural Stability and Virtual Team Conflict

Current IS research is inconclusive about the role of conflict within virtual teams (VTs). In this paper, we argue that conflict should be treated as part of the process and not as an antecedent or post-facto analysis to VT performance. We propose the concept of conflictual balance, grounded in structural balance theory (SBT) [12], to study the complex relationship between conflict and VT performance. Our paper proposes to answer the following research questions: "do virtual teams develop structural stability over time" and "is there a relationship between structural stability, conflict, and virtual team performance within a project?" As our paper is a research in progress, it is broken into two sections: a theoretical section and empirical section. The empirical section proposes a new research model that will be tested as a next step in the research process.