Managing conflict in cross-functional project teams in Hong Kong

Abstract

Review of literature of the last few decades has revealed that little research on conflict management has been conducted in the Hong Kong manufacturing industry despite Hong Kong being one of the world's most competitive economy. Noting the increasing use of the matrix organisational structure recently in Hong Kong industry, this study investigates how today's project support personnel from either marketing, product development or manufacturing section or department of their respective companies perceive and manage conflict in their project work. The research also looks at how their conflict management practice influences team and project performance. The survey was conducted in two stages, namely, exploratory interview and mail survey. Project engineers1 managers from selected local manufacturing companies were invited for the exploratory interview in order to gather information of their views on conflict management which was used to develop the questionnaire for the mail survey in the subsequent stage. The questionnaires were sent to the members of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries to validate some of the findings of the interview survey. By interviewing 28 project engineers/ managers and surveying 129 manufacturing companies, it has been found that both unresolved emotion-oriented and task-oriented conflict could have detrimental effect on team performance. It is interesting to find that more and more people from both middle and upper management levels perceive conflict could be useful. The results showed that the resolution or handling approach adopted to handle emotion-oriented and task-oriented conflict were different even though "confrontation" mode was commonly used. Past conflict management experience of functional members was found to have positive influence in the handling of task-oriented conflict while one's own past conflict management experience was useful in handling emotion-oriented conflict. The research findings lead to the development of what the author describes as the 'cognitive-affective' conflict. A conflict framework and implementation methodology is developed and proposed.

Date of Award	15 Oct 1999
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Kong Bieng CHUAH (Supervisor)