Rorational Scrimmage in Overcoming Entrenched Intraorganizational Conflicts: The Case of Chinese Professional Basketball Clubs

• In Event: Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 26: Collaboration, conflict, cohesion

Abstract

How can organizations overcome entrenched conflicts and geopolitical tensions when their members from diverse national and cultural backgrounds? In other words, how does collaboration become possible despite profound social, cultural, and political divisions within organizations? To address this question, I adopt a relational approach that conceptualizes collaboration as an interpersonal, interactional process rather than an outcome of shared values or assimilation. Drawing on multi-sited participant observation with six professional basketball clubs in China, interviews with 197 local and international players, and over 600 hours of game footage, I first show how local and foreign players develop distinct collaborative repertoires shaped by their cultural and national backgrounds. These divergent repertoires often generate intraorganizational divisions, misunderstandings, and conflict.

I then identify the organizational conditions under which such entrenched divisions can be weakened. Comparing teams across clubs, I find that effective collaboration emerged not from conformity, collectivist assimilation, or integrationist initiatives, but from structured forms of internal competition. Clubs that adopted what I call rotational scrimmage—an informal, training-based competitive routine that disrupts stable subgroups and compels players to form new, cross-cutting associations—were more capable of improving teamwork and performance over the season. By contrast, teams that emphasized homogeneity, conformity, or top-down collectivist discipline saw local and foreign players retreat into their own entrenched routines, undermining shared goals.

This study advances global sociology and organizational theory by demonstrating that cross-national collaboration is not merely a matter of shared culture but of relational structures that strategically repurpose conflict. It offers an alternative framework for understanding how groups divided by cultural, political, or geopolitical tensions can nonetheless work together effectively.

Author

• Teng Ge, University of Chicago