This study investigated the relationships between conflict management approaches, team coordination, and performance within multicultural construction project teams in Malaysia. The researchers surveyed 378 team members and leaders to assess the use of five conflict management styles (cooperative, competitive, accommodating, avoiding, compromising) and their impacts. The results showed cooperative and avoiding styles were most common. Only the cooperative style positively correlated with better team coordination, which positively impacted performance. However, the findings may not generalize beyond the Malaysian construction industry context. Future research could explore additional factors and the effects of temporary project timelines on conflict management.

1. Conflict Management, Team Coordination,
and Performance Within Multicultural
Temporary Projects: Evidence From the
Construction Industry
By
Amin Akhavan Tabassi, Aldrin Abdullah, and David James Bryde
Literature Review by
Project Managment , Analysis and evaluation
Instructor
Prof.
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2. Presentation Outline
 Introduction
 Problem Statement
 Objective of study
 Methodology
 Result & Disscusion
 Conclusion
 Litrature review and Evaluation
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3. Introduction
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Conflict
 Conflict is a process whereby one side perceives that self-interests are adversely
influenced by another party’s actions (Wall & Callister, 1995) conflict is a process
 incorporating two or more people or groups within which one party has to perceive the
other party’s actions as in opposition to its own.
 conflict is a common trait in every teamwork activity and inherent within daily
interactions
 the way a team deals with conflict significantly impacts its performance
 conflict is seen not only to have harmful consequences but also to be remarkably
constructive in some team-based work environments

4. Introduction
 Effective styles lead to conflict resolution, enhance work steadiness (Wu et al.,
2017), promote feelings of self-efficacy among team members, minimize the
likelihood of negative conflicts in future work, and also result in a company’s
long-term financial growth.
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5. Problem Statement
 Team members’ perception of the way in which their desired goals may be
affected by actions significantly influences both the nature of interactions and
the final results of conflict management
 conflict is more likely to arise and escalate when cultural differences are
present among the parties
 how a team manages conflict greatly affects team performance
 different approaches to managing conflict in group environments may affect
the way teams are coordinating
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6. Research Questions ?
1. How do Malaysians approach the management of conflict in TMC teams, and
2. Do these approaches lead to different outcomes, in terms of team coordination
and performance?
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7. Objective of Study
to investigate the relationships between conflict management
approaches, team coordination, and the performance of
multicultural project teams.
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8. Malaysian construction industry
 the temporary organizations undertaking projects in this sector are typically
multicultural, being made up of three main ethnic groups, with each having their own
cultural norms and values: Malays, Chinese, and Indians.
8 Case study

9. Methodology
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 Conflict Handling Styles
There are two main dimensions
1. cooperativeness, within which individual’s concerns are higher for peers;
and
2. assertiveness, when self-concerns are more significant.
• five different conflict resolution styles were presented, based on the degree to which
an individual practices cooperativeness or assertiveness:
• cooperative,
• competitive,
• accommodating,
• avoiding,
• and compromising

10. Conceptual Frame work
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H6: Team coordination is positively related to team performance within the TMC
organization.
H7: Team coordination mediates between conflict management approaches and team
performance within the TMC organization
Methodology

11. Methodology
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 Measuring Instruments and Data Collection
 measured using an adaption of Tabassi et al.’s (2017) survey instrument.
 Rated the conflict management style of the leaders on a 5-point Likert scale (1 ¼ “Never” to
5 ¼ “Always”)
• 378 members of 126 construction project teams in Malaysia and their
equivalent 126 team leaders, along with supervisors from the upper-level
administrative headquarters for each organization.

12. Result & Discussion
 The degree of explained variance in the hierarchical model was reflected in its
components: cooperative (62.6%), competitive (1.1%), accommodating (2.5%),
avoiding (23.6%), and compromising (4%).
 However, only the path coefficient from the cooperative approach to team
coordination was statistically significant (at p < 0.01)
 accommodating and competitive conflict management styles showed positive
relationships with team coordination, which are against the initial expectation that
hypothesized a negative relationship, these relationships were not statistically
significant
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13. Result & Discussion
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14. Result & Discussion
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Possible outcomes for people and project from five
conflict management styles

15. Conclusions
 The findings show that team leaders working in multicultural temporary
organizations in the Malaysian construction industry choose avoidance and
cooperative approaches to manage conflict, rather than the other three approaches.
 final argument is that if the ideal goals of the team members of the temporary
organization and of the project are no commensurable, then equity based, win-win
results in relationships can be illusory, and an ideal normative mutuality in
relationships will never be reached. As a result, avoiding conflict resolution could
be deemed as a win-win situation for both the people and the project
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16. Limitations & Recommendations
Temporary organizations in the construction industry in Malaysia.
For that reason, additional research of a similar nature will be
necessary to test whether the findings are generalizable to other
multicultural project environments
effective parameters that might assist the predictive strength of the
model need to be further explored
A final area for future work is on aspects relating to the temporal
nature of the project organization and how this might have
consequences in terms of the interdependencies of the different
conflict management styles
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17. Literature Review & Evaluation
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 Good literature rivew and data sampling and cases
 Indicates the gap and limitation for future research
 Limited to one case , can not be used to generalize the findings
 Abstract is not elaborative of the research ( problem statment, methodology ,
finding are not well elaborated)
 The research shows which conflict managment is better for those cases but doesnt
show how each approach affects the sucess of the project .

18. Thank you
?
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