Conflicts in new venture teams - 13 March 2019

Anna Brattström presented a longitudinal study of conflict in new venture teams. The study surfaces novel mechanisms through which everyday conversation influences conflict processes in new venture teams, challenging the assumption that affective, relationship conflict ultimately leads to detrimental outcomes. The findings are based on rich data, encompassing interviews, videotaped observations, and online chat conversations from three new venture teams over six months. Observations reveal how negative affect elicited by relationship conflict can be tolerated—or even productive—insofar as it is balanced out by positivity in everyday conversation. Anna reframes the role of negative affect in conflict: from a matter of intensity and valance to a matter of relativity and temporality.

Anna shows how everyday conversation enables new venture teams to experience intense negative affect without being overwhelmed by it, and how such teams can productively enact and settle affective relationship conflict, instead of avoiding or suppressing it. Together, these insights infuse team conflict research with a novel emphasis on everyday social interaction, and contribute to a deeper understanding of how new venture teams work together, beyond their compositional characteristics.