Event Description
Organizational life is rife with relationship conflict between members from different cultural backgrounds, particularly when they exhibit distinct workplace behaviors and interactional styles. Drawing on 42 months of comparative ethnographic fieldwork across six Chinese professional basketball clubs, Teng Ge examines relationship conflict between American-trained and Chinese-trained players based on their contrasting collaborative styles. Despite a shared goal of winning and a collectivist organizational regimen, tension and frustration between the two groups pervaded all six clubs. Yet only two clubs managed to resolve this conflict and achieve elevated team performance. Both relied on "rotational scrimmage" practices: frequent rotating lineups in daily training that cultivate cross-group competition among established players while forging novel associations across preexisting antagonistic or unrelated ones. This study advances our understanding of how culturally diverse groups can strategically introduce intrateam competition to resolve intractable relationship conflict when conventional collectivists and integrative mechanisms fail.
Event Speaker
Teng Ge, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago
Event Information
Open to Columbia University ID holders; registration required. For more information, please email Yanze Yu at [email protected].
Hosted by the China Reading and Innovation Lab at Columbia University. This event is supported by a Center for Science and Society Graduate Student Interest Group Grant.
