How Types of Culture and Conflict Impact Gaming Performance

From you casually joining a group in your favorite game to esports teams: conflicts and cultural differences may hurt performance. But what kind of conflict exactly, and how does culture fit into the picture?

🥊 Not All Conflicts Are Equal

Most esports teams and definitely the majority of us recreational gamers are virtual teams: two or more members (LoL queue) working on the same goal (winning the game), where at least one person is located somewhere else so the team members have to use information technology (League client, Discord, TeamSpeak...).

"When looking at virtual teams in several countries, the culture of the team members has to be taken into consideration. Individuals from different cultures differ regarding their communication and group behaviors." [1]

Broadly speaking, there are two types of culture:

• Individualistic cultures: The needs, values, and goals of individuals are more important than those of the group, community, country etc.
• Collectivistic cultures, on the other hand, perceive the needs, values, and goals of the group to be of higher importance.

Furthermore, conflicts are often present in teams — just think of your average League, CS, Dota etc. game, where at least one player fed, was aggressive or toxic towards someone else, or strongly disagreed with another player. However, conflict does not equal conflict. Different types of conflicts may be more present and more important than others, when it comes to their impact on performance.

In the study we'll be looking at today, the two types of conflict mean exactly what I just described:

• Task conflict: a player's perception of disagreement between team members about decisions, who does what and how. Essentially, it is a disagreement of ideas.
• Process conflict: "... conflict about how things should be handled and how to proceed in order to accomplish tasks", e.g. who places wards and where, who starts drake, or who engages the enemy team.

Using data (1,683 teams with 11,295 members from 23 countries) from the MMOG Travian and how conflict and culture are related to performance, here's what the researchers found.

📈 The Type of Conflicts That Help Your Team (and Elo Rank)

The most striking finding of the study is that task conflict (disagreeing about ideas) is positively related to performance. This means that disagreeing, and likely communicate as a consequence of it, increases performance. Process conflict (how things should be handled), however, was negatively linked to performance.

The results on culture were also statistically significant. Specifically, teams from collectivistic cultures had higher performance, which makes sense. If you put your team's goals above yours, you are probably more likely to help your team mates and support the entire team to win.

Lastly, both types of culture acted as moderator between task conflict and performance. A moderator is a variable that impacts the direction or strength of a relationship. As the authors put it:

"... teams with a collectivistic culture are more influenced by conflict than teams with an individualistic culture... Teams high in individualism are almost not affected by process conflict at all regarding team performance, while teams high in collectivism are highly impaired by process conflict." [1]

Below are two graphs that visualize this.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you all have a great week.

Christian 🙂

References

[1] Gallenkamp et al., 2010