The Effects of Cultural Diversity, Conflict and Conflict Management on Performance in Global Virtual Teams

Globalization and advances in communication technology have fuelled the emergence of global virtual teams (GVTs), which have salient cultural diversity. Prior research has demonstrated that cultural diversity has both positive and negative effect on team performance, but the mechanism for this phenomenon is still unknown. This paper presents a theory model to explore the relationship among cultural diversity, conflict, conflict management behaviors and performance in GVTs. Compared with the traditional face-to-face (FTF) teams, culture diversity may produce more conflict and lead to different conflict management behaviors in GVTs, which in turn affects team performance. Conflict management behaviors are treated as moderating variables between conflict and team performance. An experiment design for testing the hypotheses is described.