Conflicts crop up all the time in the workplace, regardless of the job or industry. So it’s critical for business leaders and workers at all levels to know how to respond when conflicts occur, either within or between organizations. Below, faculty at the Kellogg School offer strategies for handling different types of work conflict, based on their research and expertise.
1. When there’s a cross-cultural conflict
In today’s increasingly globalized world, working with people from different cultures is an everyday reality for many businesses. And with these differences arises the potential for conflict, from issues of fluency and language to differences in how to make decisions.
Failing to recognize such cultural differences can be costly.
“Misunderstanding can lead to high emotion that gets in the way of the team doing its work …, and you lose business,” says Jeanne Brett, a professor emerita of management and organizations at Kellogg and an expert in dispute resolution.
She gives the example of a tense moment between an American business and a French hotel. The two sides came to terms on a wine-tasting week at the hotel, after which the American company sent a 15-page boilerplate contract to the hotel owner.
To the Americans, it was just a pro forma part of doing business. But the French hotel owner was furious. He had taken it personally that they didn’t trust him to provide what he had committed to in their oral agreement.
Being able to recognize something as a cultural conflict when it does arise requires a particular mindset. And it’s one that leaders would be wise to develop, or hire for, Brett says.
Cultural sensitivity is about being able to say, “I see that it’s not just you trying to be difficult; it’s rather you acting as you normally would, given your culture,” she explains. “So if you can label it as ‘cultural,’ then you can begin to say, ‘Okay, now I understand where they’re coming from, let’s see how I can deal with it.’”
2. When people feel slighted
Some of the most intractable workplace conflicts involve misconduct between two or more people.
Cynthia Wang, a clinical professor of management and organizations at Kellogg, and her colleagues examined hundreds of studies about workplace misconduct that showed how people responded to negative behavior.
What stood out to Wang and her colleagues most was a noticeable tendency toward reciprocal, eye-for-an-eye forms of retaliation across all the different aspects of misconduct they studied. This surprised her.
“I expected ‘an eye for an eye’ to an extent, but I also expected more escalation or de-escalation, depending on the context,” she says.
Since negative workplace behavior is relational, meting out punishment to individuals may not break the cycle. Rather, Wang suggests it might be more effective to focus on helping the clashing parties work together to de-escalate conflicts. And because negative workplace behavior breeds further negative workplace behavior, the most important thing leaders can do is prevent people from becoming instigators in the first place.
“If one person is gossiping about someone else, or they’re sabotaging other people in minor ways, if they’re taking their resources or stealing their ideas, there’s going to be a response,” Wang says. “If you stop the one, though, you could stop the other.”
3. When bossess overlook inequity
People in positions of structural power report less inequity in their organizations than other employees, according to a series of studies led by Maryam Kouchaki, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg.
But there is a way to get them to see past their own biases and take steps to address potential discriminatory conflicts.
In one of the studies, more than 700 managers and supervisors were asked to allocate $50,000 in their workplace budget to one of six taskforces, including one aimed at reviewing and improving practices to reduce discrimination and prejudice. Before allocating the resources, some of the respondents were asked to recall an occasion when an individual at their workplace experienced bias or inequity.
Those who were asked to think about past inequity allocated 30 percent more funding to initiatives addressing discrimination than those who weren’t given the prompt. In other words, exposure to the idea of inequity in the workplace increased managers’ recognition of inequity—and their willingness to take action to address it.
Kouchaki advises leaders to look actively for processes that could be perpetuating inequalities—and seeding conflict. Pay might be equal for both men and women, for example, but perhaps bonuses aren’t.
“Make sure you are being intentional and gathering information about potential inequities,” she says.
4. When bad news breeds bad behavior
The first quarter after Donald F. Hastings took over as CEO of the welding-supply manufacturer Lincoln Electric in July 1992, the company reported a devastating $12 million plunge in assets.
One of the key tensions that Hastings recalls was figuring out how to handle worker pay in light of these losses. The company was well-known for offering hefty year-end bonuses, which, in part, was why many of its workers signed on for life and the company dominated its market. So, Hastings had to decide: Set a possibly dangerous new precedent by borrowing to pay the bonuses, or not pay them and undermine worker motivation?
Niko Matouschek, a professor of strategy at Kellogg, and his colleague developed a model to study this kind of dilemma.
They found that workers were maximally productive after being paid a bonus—and assured of yet another bonus. But when they were denied a bonus, they punished their managers by gradually lowering productivity. When companies were tight on liquidity, managers had an especially tough time navigating the conflict, and at times lost their workers.
But, the researchers write, managers could flip the script by being transparent about the situation and helping “the worker understand that more effort relaxes the firm’s liquidity constraint, which, in turn, allows the manager to pay him a larger bonus.”
In the American workplace, trust between workers and management is key, the researchers say. Otherwise, workers are likely to punish firms with decreased productivity, or even abandonment, just when their efforts are needed most.
5. When you are competing against your former team
In competitive markets, companies are often willing to go to great lengths to come out on top.
To understand what happens when people compete against their old teams or former teammates, Brian Uzzi and Noshir Contractor, both professors of management and organizations at Kellogg, along with their colleagues, analyzed data from over eight seasons of the Indian Premier League’s cricket players, teams, and match outcomes.
They found that when a team was familiar with more players on the opposing team, it was significantly more likely to win a match against that team. What’s more, a team’s familiarity with players on an opposing team proved to be far more critical to its success than overall team skill or its players’ prior shared success.
“It shows that winning isn’t just driven by individual talent or team spirit,” Uzzi says. “It also has to do with how much experience players have with teams they’re competing against.”
The same could be said for academic, business, and other types of organizations looking for a competitive edge.
In a university, for example, “you’re fighting to get the best students and funding,” Uzzi says. “That could come from taking top talent from another school and finding out how those schools competed for those things, and then maybe adopt some new practices based on what you learn.”
That line of thinking may be what motivated Apple to hire many employees from Tesla’s electric-car team years ago when Apple wanted to get started in the business, Uzzi says, “and they were looking to get those kinds of secrets.”