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Conflict Cultures in Organizations: How Leaders Shape Conflict Cultures and Their Organizational-Level Consequences

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Abstract

Anecdotal evidence abounds that organizations have distinct conflict cultures, or socially shared norms for how conflict should be managed. However, research to date has largely focused on conflict management styles at the individual and small group level, and has yet to examine whether organizations create socially shared and normative ways to manage conflict. In a sample of leaders and members from 92 branches of a large bank, factor analysis and aggregation analyses show that 3 conflict cultures-collaborative, dominating, and avoidant-operate at the unit level of analysis. Building on Lewin, Lippitt, and White's (1939) classic work, we find that leaders' own conflict management behaviors are associated with distinct unit conflict cultures. The results also demonstrate that conflict cultures have implications for macro branch-level outcomes, including branch viability (i.e., cohesion, potency, and burnout) and branch performance (i.e., creativity and customer service). A conflict culture perspective moves beyond the individual level and provides new insight into the dynamics of conflict management in organizational contexts. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved).
Conflict Cultures in Organizations: How Leaders Shape Conflict Cultures
and Their Organizational-Level Consequences
Michele J. Gelfand
University of Maryland Lisa M. Leslie
University of Minnesota
Kirsten Keller
Rand Corporation Carsten de Dreu
University of Amsterdam
Anecdotal evidence abounds that organizations have distinct conflict cultures, or socially shared norms
for how conflict should be managed. However, research to date has largely focused on conflict
management styles at the individual and small group level, and has yet to examine whether organizations
create socially shared and normative ways to manage conflict. In a sample of leaders and members from
92 branches of a large bank, factor analysis and aggregation analyses show that 3 conflict cultures—
collaborative, dominating, and avoidant—operate at the unit level of analysis. Building on Lewin,
Lippitt, and White’s (1939) classic work, we find that leaders’ own conflict management behaviors are
associated with distinct unit conflict cultures. The results also demonstrate that conflict cultures have
implications for macro branch-level outcomes, including branch viability (i.e., cohesion, potency, and
burnout) and branch performance (i.e., creativity and customer service). A conflict culture perspective
moves beyond the individual level and provides new insight into the dynamics of conflict management
in organizational contexts.
Keywords: culture, conflict management, norms, leadership, organizations
Why do some organizations develop cultures in which conflict
is managed productively, whereas others have cultures in which
members consistently work against one another, sabotaging each
other in and out of the boardroom? Southwest Airlines, for exam-
ple, has been argued to have a collaborative conflict culture (Git-
tell, 2003), whereas other organizations such as Playco describe
themselves as having a dominating conflict culture, approaching
conflict like they are in “the Old West” or through “warfare
games” (Morill, 1995, p. 195). Still others, such as the now defunct
Wang laboratories, are known to have avoidant cultures, in which
people actively suppress conflict at all costs (Finkelstein, 2005).
Conflict cultures emerge not only in traditional organizations but
also in other contexts, such as the inner circles of the 2008
democratic presidential candidates. “No drama Obama” was
known to have a “circle of people who were collaborative and
nondefensive” (Tumulty, 2008, p. 1), whereas Hillary Clinton was
headlined as having “a staff consumed with infighting over how to
sell their candidate” (Sheehy, 2008, p. 2). For psychologists, many
questions remain unasked and unanswered: Is there any evidence
that conflict cultures exist at the organizational level? How do such
distinct conflict cultures develop? How do leaders shape the de-
velopment of conflict cultures? What are the consequences of
conflict cultures for organizational-level outcomes?
Answers to these questions cannot be found in the psychological
literature on conflict, which has generally focused on conflict
management styles at the individual and small group level. In this
research, we start with the premise that although individuals have
idiosyncratic preferences for different conflict management strat-
egies, organizations provide strong contexts (Johns, 2006;
O’Reilly & Chatman, 1996) that serve to define socially shared
and normative ways to manage conflict—what we refer to as
conflict cultures—which reduce individual variation in conflict
management strategies (De Dreu, van Dierendonck, & Dijkstra,
2004;Gelfand, Leslie, & Keller, 2008). Because norms typically
develop around fundamental problems that need to be managed in
any social system (Schein, 1992;Schwartz, 1994), and conflict is
an inherent problem in most if not all organizational systems
(Argyris, 1971;Katz & Kahn, 1978;Thomas, 1976;Walton,
Dutton, & Cafferty, 1969), we expect that conflict cultures can
develop in many organizations.
Here we develop a conflict cultures paradigm and provide a
first-time test across 92 bank branches. We propose that conflict
cultures, like their individual level and small-group analogues
(e.g., De Church & Marks, 2001;De Dreu, 2006;De Dreu &
Weingart, 2003a;Jehn, 1995;Jehn & Mannix, 2001;Lovelace,
This article was published Online First October 1, 2012.
Michele J. Gelfand, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland;
Lisa M. Leslie, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota;
Kirsten Keller, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, CA; Carsten de Dreu,
Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
This research was based on work supported in part by U.S. Airforce
Grant FA9550-12-1-0021 and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and the
U.S. Army Research Office under Grant W911NF-08-1-0144.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michele
J. Gelfand, Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College
Park, MD 20742. E-mail: mgelfand@umd.edu
Journal of Applied Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association
2012, Vol. 97, No. 6, 1131–1147 0021-9010/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0029993
1131
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly.
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