[MUSIC] If you think for a moment, again, about this statement that we opened this part with, does a diverse team always perform better than a team that is more homogenous? Now, after having seen these different perspectives, probably you can see that the answer is no, a diverse team will not always perform better than a more homogenous team. Rather take into account the recommendations and think about what it is that the team is doing and where or not, you want your team to be more diverse, or you want your team members to be more similar to each other. Now, let's continue discussing about what do people actually do when they work together? We've discussed about design of the team, about composing the team, so making decisions who is on the team and who is not. Now we're going to be discussing what happens when these people come together to do actually the work. This is the topic that we call team processes. How are members working together? This, of course, as you probably have a hunch already, this is a very broad topic. We can talk about communication, cooperation, task execution, reflecting. Many, many different things that are happening here in people performing the work. I would just want to highlight a few key processes. The first is going to be conflict and I have a question again for you. Team conflict can be very helpful for team performance. What do you think about that? Do you agree? Do you disagree? Can you think about examples from teams that you worked in the past for which maybe conflict was helpful or maybe it was not. How do you see that? Let me continue talking about conflict and the thing with conflict is that the one conflict is really not the other type of conflict. In fact, researchers have distinguished between three different types of conflict. The first is relationship conflict. This is the type of conflict that maybe you would most intuitively relate to when thinking about conflict. This is where team members have disagreement, things get emotional. Things may get personal. So really something is happening within the relationship between the people working together. This type of conflict, in fact, is harmful. There's a lot of research showing that this relationship, this personal emotional type of conflict, basically, it takes away time, energy and efforts that team members otherwise would have spent on the work, on actually completing the task, and direct it towards conflict. This is a type of conflict that is never helpful and that is in fact very harmful for team performance. The second type of conflict is task conflict. This is really more like when people are debating, when people are arguing, when team members are trying to find the best solution. They may not necessarily agree, they may have a lot of discussions and intense debates about what needs to be done but it's not yet personal. This, in fact, is a type of conflict which can be very helpful for team performance because it is through this type of debates, discussions, disagreements that opinions get sharpened, that more information gets to the table. The creative solutions are being thought out in order to do justice to all the arguments that have been on the table that have been discussed. This, in fact, is a type of conflict which can be very helpful for team performance. However, as you maybe can relate to already, these type of conflicts even though when in theory we can nicely separate them, in practice they tend to be intertwined. What starts as maybe a task conflict, as a work related discussion, may easily spill over into a more personal thing, interrelationship conflict. This, in the end, is the thing to avoid and to manage. It's important for a team leader to take responsibility for that but basically, it's also something for all the team members. If you feel that your task-related discussions, your debates, are spilling over, are getting personal, this is what you should stop in an early stage because relationship conflict, you don't want that in your team. It's bad and it's hurting for performance. There's a third type of conflict, which is called process conflict. This is, if you would want to see it that way, let's say, a specific type of task conflict. Because we're still discussing about the work, but we're discussing now about how to go about the work. How do we accomplish a task? When are we going to start working? When are we going to deliver our first milestone? When are we bringing in the first results? This is all those discussions and disagreements and debates that you have about how you should go about doing the work. Same as with task conflict, this type of conflict tends to be very helpful because it is something good when, in fact, as a team you discuss and you explicitly reflect on what needs to be done. How are we going to do it? What is the best approach to achieve it? It is though, something that you want to make sure that it's especially helpful in the beginning of a project, in the beginning of when you start working. If you continue having this very high level of process conflict all the way through your project, all the way through your team, it may, in fact, also start to be hurting the collective output of your team. You see three different types of conflicts. Relationship conflicts, avoid. Task conflict, stimulate. But make sure you manage it very well so that it doesn't spill over to relationship conflict. Process conflict allow it and stimulate it, especially in the early stages of team work. So with that, I think we can see that for our statement, team conflict can be helpful. In fact, we would have to agree it can be helpful. But it's a tricky business, so you need to make sure that you manage it quite well in order to stay on the good side of conflict. [MUSIC]
