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LET'S TAKE THIS OFFLINE: A THEMATIC ANALYSIS OF VIRTUAL CONFLICT IN HYBRID COLLABORATIVE DESIGN TEAMS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

Meagan Flus ,
Sharon Ferguson  and
Alison Olechowski
Meagan Flus*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Sharon Ferguson
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
Alison Olechowski
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
*
Flus, Meagan, University of Toronto, Canada, meagan.flus@mail.utoronto.ca

Abstract

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Conflict can be both a productive and detrimental reality of design collaboration. While most studies on conflict characterize findings by type (conflict about the task, process, or interpersonal relationships), we extend this typology to understand the causes, topics, and outcomes of conflict. To do so, we analyze communications in a virtual chat platform, collected in a hybrid work environment. A thematic analysis on over 6000 messages between student design teams on the enterprise communication platform Slack revealed three emergent conflict themes: Engineering Design, Project Management, and Communication. A mapping of the themes to a widely-cited typology of conflict found an over- representation of task (productive) and process (detrimental) conflict in the Engineering Design and Project Management themes, respectively. The distribution of types of conflict in the Communication theme is representative of the entire dataset, suggesting that communication can be a cause and outcome in all types of conflict. Overall, our classification of conflict is the first step towards describing triads of the causes, topics, and outcomes of conflict, a contribution which will drive the development of interventions for design team conflict.

Keywords

TeamworkCommunicationCollaborative designConflictHybrid Collaboration
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 3: ICED23 , July 2023 , pp. 2435 - 2444
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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