A special breed of transformational leadership? Integrating conflict management and ethnicity into team coordination in multicultural temporary environments

Akhavan Tabassi, Amin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2347-7894 (2023) A special breed of transformational leadership? Integrating conflict management and ethnicity into team coordination in multicultural temporary environments. In: EURAM 2023, 14 June 2023 - 16 June 2023, Trinity Business School in Dublin, Ireland.

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Abstract

Conflict is common during group activities, and how leaders deal with team members and the conflicts that arise in a project team environment can significantly affect team coordination. This study explores how conflict is dealt with by providing empirical evidence of relationships between transformational leadership style, conflict management styles and the ethnicity of leaders in multicultural project environments in the construction industry. The research extends conflict management style into the transformational leadership behaviour of team leaders to identify their effects on team coordination. Moreover, it evaluates how the ethnicity of leaders can moderate the relationships. This contribution is exceptional for bringing three moderating ethnic groups while drawing on data from 126 teams in the construction industry, using PLS path modelling to test our hypotheses. The results demonstrate that cooperative and conflict-avoiding management styles are positively related to team coordination. The judicious and considered use of the conflict-avoiding management style, in particular, should be recognised as an appropriate solution in certain multi-cultural team contexts by transformational leaders. Teams also exhibited stronger coordination when the team leader was nominated from a specific ethnic group. Possible directions in which future research can be structured are also outlined.