A preliminary study on the cause of conflicts in multidisciplinary collaboration

With the globalization of business models and competition, traditional individual work mode is gradually replaced by multidisciplinary collaboration as more and more work needs to integrate different specialized knowledge. Accordingly, the process of interdisciplinary talent training has also become one of the hot topics in education. Therefore, this study tried to explore the causes of conflicts in multidisciplinary team collaboration. In the study, we collected relevant researches on multidisciplinary teams over the ten years and selected five papers involving the research on the cooperation process of the same, among which we found that each team involved at least two of three fields, namely engineering, management and design. This paper sorted out the problems arising from multidisciplinary collaboration through content analysis and grouped them through KJ method (also called affinity diagram method) in collaboration with researchers with exact experience, for further analysis and induction. According to the study, problems encountered by multidisciplinary teams can be classified into nine categories: professional background, team composition, task allocation, role positioning, relationship, communication, attitude, efficiency and external factors. To be specifically, (1) professional background: a problem related to team member’s majors, for different majors have different languages, with rare knowledge in other fields and inconsistent cognitions; (2) team composition: a problem concerned with the structure of the organization, the imbalance among specialties for example; (3) job assignment: a problem regarding the allocation of different tasks, clear or not; (4) role positioning: a problem related to the positioning of members within the team, like absence of leader for specific work; (5) relationship: a problem regarding the interactions between team members, such as being unacquainted, holding different opinions, etc.; (6) communication: about the exchange of knowledge or intelligence, such as poor communication, differences in opinions and ideas, etc.; (7) attitude: a problem in personal style, for example, uncompromising insistence on one’s own professional acknowledge; (8) efficiency: a problem related to the completion of tasks, stagnation for failing to find answers to specific concerns for instance; (9) external factors: problems that are difficult for team members to control, such as lack of funds and time, geographical inconvenience, dissatisfaction of the clients, etc. This study is expected to clarify the problems arising in the process of multidisciplinary team collaboration, providing references for subsequent researchers.