Structured Conflict Approaches used in Strategic Decision Making: from Mason’s Initial Study to Virtual Teams

Structured Conflict Approaches Used in Strategic Decision Making focuses on strategic planning processes which use structured conflict to aid in elicitating and exposing management’s underlying assumptions and how to stimulate management to adopt a broader view of the planning problem. The objective is to examine the whether structured conflict procedures are superior to expert or consensus-oriented procedures in face-to-face and virtual teams working on strategic decision-making tasks. The author begins with a brief background in section 2, then section 3 discusses structured conflict, followed by philosophical and empirical debate in section 4. Section 5 examines structured conflict: devil’s advocacy and dialectical inquiry studies in both case and field, and experimental studies. Section 6 presents an integrative analysis of the structured conflict studies. Section 7 focuses on leadership. Section 8 addresses structured conflict and leadership in virtual teams. Section 9 is the conclusion and addresses the issues of this paper and discusses potential future studies.