Conflict, Leadership, and Performance: What Virtual Team Members Need to Know Completed Research Paper

Conflict and leadership are both individually well-studied elements of group development. In this paper we seek to understand how leadership and conflict coexist within a team's development and what the temporal context is within which they emerge for higher- versus lower-performing teams. In order to investigate this question we collected survey data, message postings and performance scores for 22 virtual teams over an 11-week period. Our results suggest that high-performing teams experience less relational conflict, engage in more task leadership, and respond more promptly to conflict with appropriate leadership behaviors. We situate these findings in the context of what virtual team members need to know.