Article archive / April 1, 2013
Originally published: . Volume 4, No. 8. Source pages: 10.
Because of the Easter vacation and spring breaks happening all over the state, I’m going to have to write the Gumbo column all by myself this month. (There was of course some lack of planning ahead on my part, also. “Easter is when?!”)
But this gives me an opportunity to pound on the desk about a topic near and dear to my heart: Conflict.
I’m generally comfortable with conflict under most conditions, and so I’m a supporter of collaborating (not the same as compromising) and I also find that my temperament is poorly suited to any situation where conflict is to be glossed over.
So when I see an article validating my position I jump on it.
• “Conflict Cultures in Organizations: How Leaders Shape Conflict Cultures and Their Organizational-Level Consequences” – Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol 97, No. 6 2012.
Gelfand and others provide a fine offering when they look at leaders and employees in 92 branches of a large bank. They identified the three “conflict cultures” that correspond to what we know are individual conflict styles: collaborative, dominating, and avoidant. They build on Lewin, Lippitt and White’s 1939 work and find that leaders’ conflict styles influence their groups, creating a “conflict culture.”
Probably what is more important, Gelfand’s results show that conflict cultures have implications for organizational results.
“Another contribution of this research is that we uncovered relation- ships between distinct conflict cultures, on the one hand, and indicators of organizational viability and effectiveness, on the other. Avoidant cultures negatively related to branch-level creativity, whereas dominating cultures negatively associated with customer service and cohesion. Reversely, collaborative conflict cultures positively related to organizational viability— cohesion and potency—and lower levels of burnout.”
The authors also found some interesting convergent/divergent validity with climate variables:
Collaborative Dominating Avoidant
Psychological safety .56** –.57** –.20*
Distributive justice .42** –.34** –.57**
Procedural justice .41** –.20* –.07
Interpersonal justice .31** –.33** –.06
Learning orientation .64** –.33** –.32**
Performance orientation .03 .11 –.08
* <.05, ** <.01
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.