Virtual teams - teams collaborating predominantly through information and communication technology - are ubiquitous in modern business as a means of organizing interorganizational work efforts. Virtual teams have also received considerable interest in academic research, and one of the emerging themes in recent research is how virtual teams resolve conflict. Process facilitation has been discovered to reduce the amount of conflict and improve conflict resolution in collocated teams. The impact of facilitation on conflict resolution in virtual teams, on the other hand, has not been researched.

This Master's thesis addresses the void in research through an empirical case study. In the case study six global virtual student teams, consisting of civil engineering students from three international universities, collaborate to carry out a complex project assignment from construction and design industry. Two Finnish facilitator students are added as external members to three of the case teams with the task of supporting coordination and collaboration in the virtual teams. The impact of facilitation in the case study is assessed through both qualitative and quantitative methods.

The findings of the study suggest that the relationship between conflict resolution and facilitation is twofold in the context of global virtual collaborative teams. Firstly, through the improvement of communication, coordination and socio-emotional processes, facilitation can reduce the amount of detrimental conflict. Secondly, facilitators can function as objective and neutral third parties in conflict situations, thereby improving the effectiveness of conflict resolution through a variety of intervention strategies. Moreover, the study offers detailed insight on the special characteristics of conflict emergence, process facilitation and conflict resolution in the context of virtual teams based on a review of existing research as well as findings from the empirical case study.