A Diagnostic Tool for Managing Conflict at its Sources

To successfully resolve a conflict or dispute, Alex Colvin (Cornell), Dionne Pohler (Saskatchewan), and I assert that you must first understand its roots or sources, and then appropriately match a dispute resolution method. We call this "managing conflict at its sources." To this end, we’ve created a three-part typology of the roots of conflict—specifically, structural, cognitive, and dispositional sources of conflict—to facilitate the identification of effective dispute resolution methods tailored to the particular sources of a given dispute. 

This can be facilitated by a diagnostic tool that helps parties to a conflict ask the right questions. For starters,

1. Diagnose the structural nature of the relationship between the parties

• What are their interests or goals, rights, and sources of power? 
• What are their value orientations or identity needs?
• What are the rules or institutions that govern their relationship?
• Are there scarce resources involved? 
• Why are the parties in a relationship together? Are there better alternative options? How much does their success depend on the other’s?
• If there are reasons for a lasting interdependency, are their interests mostly able to be aligned (mutual self-benefit), mostly conflicting with each, or a mixture of both?

2. Diagnose the cognitive sources of conflict

• What cognitive frames shape how each participant perceives and interprets the situation, and influences desired action? This can reflect culture, individual experiences, and individual preferences.  
• Are there cognitive limitations (e.g., information overload) or cognitive biases (e.g., loss aversion, anchoring, framing, fixed-pie perception, exaggeration of conflict, illusions of transparency, decision fatigue, or overconfidence)?
• Are there information limitations, imbalances, and/or uncertainties?
• Are there intergroup tensions based on in-group/out-group identification?
• Are there sources of miscommunication, such as noisy communication channels, different meanings, incorrect filtering of intent, and misinterpretation of nonverbal cues and personal demeanor?

3. Diagnose the dispositional sources of conflict

• What emotions or mood might be positively or negatively affecting the situation?
• Are there personality factors that shape how one or more participants feel, think, and/or behave? 
• Are there differences in personality that clash?

Not all of these will apply in every situation. But for those that do, the diagnostic tool then helps connect these underlying sources with the implications for how to manage this kind of conflict. 

The animated version of "Managing Conflict at its Sources" also provides an introductory overview: 

 

Managing Conflict at its Sources

In Director Bong Joon-ho’s highly-acclaimed movie Parasite (2019), the wealthy Park family believes that they have a win-win relationship with the lower-class Kims. The Kims, however, view this relationship very differently, allowing them to prioritize their own interests in this relationship. If we were to step into this in the middle of the movie, we’d need to get the Parks to see the actual nature of their relationship, while also addressing the perceptions and emotions that are fueling a simmering conflict between the two families. Moreover, on an appropriately dark and stormy night, the xxxxxxx’s have an unexpected encounter with xxxxxxx and xxxxxxx (redacted to avoid a spoiler). Emotions flare up (especially fear), and magnify the fixed pie cognitive bias that pushes us to assume sharp conflicts of interest, leading all involved to treat this as a win-lose battle for self-preservation. Again, if we were to step in and try to resolve this before it spirals downward and reaches lower depths (an inside reference for those who have seen the movie), we’d need to re-frame the nature of their relationship (they have some common goals), address their decision-making, and help them cool their emotions.

Alex Colvin (Cornell), Dionne Pohler (Toronto), and I call this “managing conflict at its sources.” In other words, to successfully resolve a conflict or dispute, you must first understand its roots or sources, and then appropriately match a dispute resolution method. So we’ve created a three-part typology of the roots of conflict—specifically, structural, cognitive, and psychogenic sources of conflict—to facilitate the identification of effective dispute resolution methods tailored to the particular sources of a given dispute. These are described in my earlier blog posting, but brief definitions are useful here. Structural sources pertain to nature of the parties’ relationship, including their power, rights, and interlinked interests or goals. Cognitive sources relate to mental functioning, including interpretation, perception, information processing, decision-making, and (mis)communication. Psychogenic sources arise from the psychology of feelings, especially emotions, moods, and personality.

We believe that it’s important to diagnose a conflict by looking for these sources because they require different approaches to resolve them. Resolving structural conflicts requires diagnosing the nature of the parties’ relationship. Key alternatives include (i) a self-interested exchange with accessible alternatives (egoist); (ii) lasting interdependence with a mutual gains structure (unitarist); (iii) lasting interdependence with a mixed-motive structure (pluralist); or (iv) lasting interdependence with a win-lose structure (antagonistic). Recognizing these structural forms is important for factoring in issues of power. In an egoist relationship, power is less important than self-interest. If someone gives you a good deal, take it; if not, take your next best alternative. In a unitarist relationship, a focus on power likely interferes with finding interest-aligning policies. In contrast, power differences are likely a significant aspect of an antagonistic relationship, and distributive negotiations would be fully consistent in this structure. Integrative bargaining is very difficult in an antagonistic structure. In a pluralist relationship, both distributive and integrative negotiations are likely, and the parties or third party dispute resolution actors would likely need to ensure that power is not exercised in an overly aggressive way that undermines the shared interests and enduring nature of the relationship.

The effectiveness of third party interventions also varies across these relationship types. In an egoist relationship, the main need for third party intervention is to adjudicate alleged violations of contractual terms, which points toward arbitration-type procedures that provide a clear determination. In a unitarist relationship, in contrast, the importance of mutuality means that the arbitration of conflicts could be counter-productive; rather, mediation-type interventions are most useful in helping the parties recognize their mutual interests and resolve any coordination problems or barriers to achieving the integrative potential inherent in their relationship. But in antagonistic relationships, mediation efforts that search for common interests are incompatible with the fundamental oppositions of interests that drive conflict in this structural form, and thus would likely be futile. By contrast, pluralist relationships are most open to a range of interventions, including mediation- and arbitration-type third party interventions, reflecting the diverse nature of distribution and integrative issues inherent in this type of relationship.

Turning to the cognitive dimension, there are various techniques to address perceptual differences rooted in contrasting cognitive frames, such as a process of unfreezing, changing, and refreezing frames, either with or without mediator assistance. Other interventions can explicitly address cultural differences (more generally, in-group versus out-group conflicts). Regarding conflicts that have an aspect of limited information processing, people can more easily identify cognitive errors made by others than themselves. Providing individuals training in decision-making biases and teaching them critical thinking and self-awareness can help them become aware of decision-making blind spots to work through this type of cognitive conflict. Similarly, recognizing when miscommunication causes or contributes to a conflict also points to specific conflict resolution strategies. This can include avoiding communication channels with low signal-to-noise ratios, listening for the intended meanings of what’s being said, communicating in ways that the listener will understand your intent and that reflects the listener’s perspective, and establishing conditions under which an effective dialogue can occur.  

Psychogenic conflict is perhaps the most difficult type of conflict to tackle, and again requires tailored dispute resolution strategies. This aspect of conflict is not easily resolved through negotiation, nor is it likely to be truly resolved by the imposition of a solution by a third party such as a manager or an arbitrator. Indeed, the most accessible strategy is to give people tools to work through their own emotions, or to control their moods in different situations, either in advance of a conflict or during it. When dealing with hot emotions, cooling strategies such as taking a time-out or a break and trying to re-orient an individual’s attention to be more reflective and self-distanced rather than self-immersed can facilitate problem solving. If hot emotions like anger or humiliation  are contributing to a conflict, then facilitators can lessen these emotions by acknowledging them. An understanding of how different personality types approach not only conflict, but feeling, thinking, and behavior more generally also can be useful to understand how to engage with others constructively with others.

Lastly, not only might a dispute be complex (so don't stop after identifying the first cause), conflict can be dynamic and evolve around over time. As such, the source(s) of the conflict can change in the midst of attempts to resolve the initial source(s) of the dispute. This reinforces the need for those trying to resolve disputes to understand the range of possible sources of conflict, so that changes in the nature or sources of a particular dispute can be identified and appropriately addressed, rather than inadvertently contributing to compounding the conflict. In Parasite, the initial conflict between the wealthy and poor families appeared economic in nature, but with greater personal contact came new challenges that were more cognitive and especially psychogenic in nature. To continue to treat this conflict as purely economic (structural) and to ignore other smelly issues (another inside reference) would not produce a lasting resolution to this conflict. To effectively manage conflict at its sources is to recognize that dispute resolution needs to be tailored to the specifics of each conflict based on a careful diagnosis of the possible overlapping and changing structural, cognitive, and psychogenic dimensions.

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Source: John W. Budd, Alexander J.S. Colvin, and Dionne Pohler (2020) "Advancing Dispute Resolution by Understanding the Sources of Conflict: Toward an Integrated Framework," ILR Review 73(2): 254-80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793919866817. [free access to the pre-publication version here]

What Causes Conflict? A New Three-Dimensional Framework

Put yourself in the shoes of a  manager who believes that a dispute is preventing two co-workers from working together effectively. What do you do? Possibilities might include encouraging them to get along, locking them in a room until they work out their differences, threatening them with consequences if their work doesn’t improve, giving one of them authority over the other, reassigning one of them, or extending a deadline on a project to give them more time. But here is an important complication: each of these possible solutions will only work if it matches the actual source of the dispute. So before jumping to a preferred intervention, we need to explicit identify the sources of a particular dispute.

In the case of the ineffective co-workers, there are numerous causes. Perhaps the two workers believe that they are competing for scarce resources, such as administrative support or a single promotion opening. Maybe the workers come from different cultural backgrounds and perceive a lack of respect for each other. Perhaps one had an emotional outburst that created lingering bad feelings. It could be the case that they disagree over tasks because they foresee different uses for a product they are developing. Maybe one or both of them face difficulties communicating. Maybe all (or none) of these causes underlie this particular dispute. Not all dispute or conflict resolution methods will be equally effective in these different scenarios, and a failure to diagnose and resolve the source(s) of a conflict can cause it to persist if not escalate.

For a dispute resolution method to be successful, the parties must first understand the sources of the conflict to choose an appropriate solution. But what are the possible sources of conflict? Alex Colvin (Cornell), Dionne Pohler (Toronto), and I scoured the multidisciplinary scholarly and professional literature on conflict and have created a three-part typology of the roots of conflict. We label the three key categories as structural, cognitive, and psychogenic.

Structural conflicts result from the relationship between the parties’ interests or goals, rights, and sources of power. The classic conflict over scarce resources is when these interests are focused on things to satisfy material needs and desires. But conflicts are also possible over clashing value orientations (e.g., differing emphases on fairness, inclusion, or respect) or identity needs for a sense of purpose and meaning in one’s life, including those connected to group affiliations such as racial, ethnic, or religious affinities. We label this category “structural conflict” because the nature of these conflicts is determined by the rules, institutions, and practices in which this relationship is situated—in other words, by the structural nature of the relationship.

Cognitive conflicts relate to mental functioning. This is a broad category that includes a variety of ways in which cognition may cause or contribute to a dispute: interpretation, perception, information processing, decision-making, and communication. The human brain is not unitary or always internally consistent. So conflicts can arise because individuals perceive the same problem differently, such as when one uses a heuristic and another approaches it analytically. Common types of cognitive bias that result in conflict include loss aversion, anchoring, framing, fixed-pie perception, exaggeration of conflict, illusions of transparency, decision fatigue, and overconfidence. Individuals can also be motivated to process information in ways that validate preexisting beliefs, rather than by a search for accuracy, and in ways that magnify in-group/out-group differences. Individuals may also have different preferences or differences of opinion over how to interact or solve a problem, perhaps influenced by cultural or other differences. Lastly, communication is a cognitive activity that can lead to conflict when it breaks down. Miscommunication can result in many ways, such as noisy communication channels, different meanings, incorrect filtering of intent, and misinterpretation of nonverbal cues and personal demeanor.

Lastly, psychogenic conflict arises from the psychology of feelings. This has two main subdimensions. First, emotions and moods can cause conflict through the behaviors they create or by influencing decision-making. For example, anger, frustration, contempt, jealousy, and other hot emotions can lead to aggressive communication behaviors (e.g., criticism, contempt, and shouting) while lessening constructive communication behaviors (e.g., active listening). The recipient of negative emotions often tries to counter this by lashing out or other responses that distracts them away from processing information and making sound decisions; conversely, happy individuals tend to make riskier decisions which can also be a source of conflict. Second, personality differences can also cause or contribute to disputes. Individuals with high values of neuroticism and extraversion and/or low values of agreeableness may be more likely to be contentious, antagonistic, irritable, and even want to dominate others, whereas those who score low on openness and conscientiousness tend to be inflexible and disorganized, which can clash with those who prefer a different approach. Personality can also affect conflict by affecting an individual’s attributions—for example, different personality types tend to see a conflict as either task- or relationship-based.

Returning to the opening scenario, did you stop and consider possible sources of conflict before moving ahead to an intervention? Effective dispute resolution must be rooted in a comprehensive and accurate understanding of a conflict’s roots. But disputes can be multi-faceted with numerous causes that interact in complicated ways. Just look at the complexity of the conflict over NFL players kneeling during the national anthem. My co-authors and I submit that it is important to conceptually distinguish different aspects of the full range of sources of conflict to appreciate the nature of each particular dispute. So in analyzing any conflict, look for structural, cognitive, and psychogenic aspects. Not all will be present in every dispute, but it’s better to look for them and rule them out than to not look at all and miss a major factor.

[Update: also see a follow-up posting on managing conflict at its sources]

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Source: John W. Budd, Alexander J.S. Colvin, and Dionne Pohler (2020) "Advancing Dispute Resolution by Understanding the Sources of Conflict: Toward an Integrated Framework," ILR Review 73(2): 254-80. https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793919866817. [free access to the pre-publication version here]

Lessons for Resolving Conflict from the NFL Players Anthem Dispute and Papal Conclaves

With Thanksgiving comes football, and with football comes…well, this year, maybe politics. While perhaps not as heated as in September and October, the NFL player anthem protest controversy has not been completely resolved. Before reading further, I’d like you to think about what underlies this dispute. Have you thought about it? Once you have thought about it, be honest—how many factors did you identify? My hypothesis is that most people would identify one main cause, or maybe two at most. People might differ in what cause they identify, but my point here is that it’s common to not think very deeply about the diverse factors that contribute to any particular conflict. Rather, the emphasis is typically on dispute resolution mechanisms.

There is a long history of this. New popes are elected through a papal conclave. “Conclave” comes from the Latin cum clave which means “with key.” Following the death of Pope Clement IV in 1268, cardinals met in Viterbo in central Italy to choose a successor. But political infighting prevented an agreement for many months. As the dispute dragged on, frustration with the lack of progress led city officials to lock the cardinals in the Palazzo dei Papi di Viterbo (hence “with key”), reduce their food rations, and even to remove the palazzo’s roof to expose them to the weather. After 33 months, Gregory X was elected pope, and he implemented rules for papal conclaves that included seclusion, food rations reduced to a single meal after three days, further food reductions after eight days, and the stoppage of any payments to them from the papal treasury during the conclave.

Using their bully pulpits, U.S. political leaders have occasionally tried similar strategies to force labor negotiators to reach agreements. President Lyndon Johnson called labor and company negotiators from the steel industry (1965) and copper industry (1968) to Washington, DC, and pressured them to negotiate in the Executive Office Building until they reached agreements. In 2016, Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton called negotiators from Allina Health and the nurses union to the governor’s residence and asked them to keep negotiating in that location until they settled their strike, which they did. While these political leaders don’t have the legal authority to sequester the negotiators cum clave, and they were not deprived of food or a roof, the spirit of these tactics are similar to the conclave pressures—increase the pressure on negotiators to settle a dispute.

By itself, these pressures do nothing to address, or even consider, the underlying factors leading or contributing to a particular dispute. Rather, these tactics assume that the dispute is structural in nature—a power struggle between groups with competing interests—and the solution is increased pressure to compromise. Of course, there are many other options for resolving disputes, including mediation, arbitration, rules, and legal proceedings. Mediation is perhaps the only one that has a chance to address the root causes of a dispute, and even in this case I assert that we need a greater explicit attention on the root causes of a dispute.

Returning to the NFL players anthem protest, when the focus is on rights (“is this legal?”) and consequences (“they should be fired or suspended”), this implicitly reduces the dispute to its structural aspects—who has the power to do what? But there many other layers. For example, miscommunication has contributed to the dispute, as when one of the team owners said “We can’t have the inmates running the prison,” and then issued a statement saying that this was not what he meant. There are also diverse cognitive aspects, including cultural differences that shape people’s judgements, interpretations, and priorities, often magnified by emotional reactions. It’s not just one thing, and how to best or fully resolve a dispute requires tailoring dispute resolution processes to these underlying causes.

So if you find yourself in a conflict on Thanksgiving as relatives with clashing political views gather, or on any other day in myriad other situations, pay more attention to the multiple contributing causes to a dispute before either escalating or jumping to a dispute resolution intervention. And watch this space for more about these issues because I'm working with Alex Colvin (Cornell) and Dionne Pohler (Toronto) to address the frequent oversimplification of, if not lack of attention to, the roots of conflict. Happy Thanksgiving. 

[Updates: a February 2019 posting on the sources of conflict, and a February 2020 posting on managing conflict at its sources]

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Further reading: For an early view of our research on the causes of conflict, see our conference paper "Advancing Dispute Resolution by Unpacking the Sources of Conflict: Toward an Integrated Framework," which we were honored to present earlier this month at the ILR School conference honoring David Lipsky.

Questioning the Conventional Wisdom: Do Consensual Dispute Resolution Methods Produce Better Relationships?

Think of a dispute you’ve had with a person or entity that you have an ongoing relationship with, like a business, employer, co-worker, or neighbor. Was that dispute resolved between the two of you, or did it involve a third-party determination by a judge, arbitrator, superior, or some other authority? Do you think it mattered how the dispute was resolved? Would your behavior have changed if it was resolved differently?

Conflict resolution professionals and academics have long believed that voluntarily-negotiated agreements produce better long-run relationships than third-party imposed resolutions. This is because the participants can control their own destiny, tailor agreements to their liking, and feel greater ownership in the process and the outcome. Sounds sensible. But there is very little evidence beyond the parties feeling satisfied immediately after resolution. Maybe a formal procedure like a courtroom or arbitration hearing provides greater levels of due process, or the process doesn’t really matter for a long-term relationship because people forget what happened. More research is needed to find out if the conventional wisdom really is accurate.

So in a paper with my colleague Aaron Sojourner and a University of Minnesota human resources Master’s alum Jaewoo Jung, we analyze data from Major League Baseball to test whether voluntarily-negotiated agreements produce better long-run relationships than third-party imposed resolutions. Baseball players with between three (sometimes two) and six years of service are eligible for salary arbitration with their current team. In any given year, some go to arbitration while many settle voluntarily. If voluntarily-negotiated agreements are meaningfully better, then in the following season we would expect to see better on-field performance and more lasting relationships for those who voluntarily reached a salary agreement compared to those who went to arbitration and had a new salary imposed on them.

Indeed, in 1974 Minnesota Twins pitcher Dick Woodson won the very first arbitration hearing but was traded to the richer New York Yankees less than three months later. So the ability to tailor contractual outcomes to the fit the parties’ preferences can be constrained by the arbitration process, and as a result, the parties to a consensual agreement might be more satisfied which results in stronger on-field performance and a longer lasting relationship. But is this just an isolated example?

Using 24 years of data comparing players who arbitrated with those who settled just before arbitrating, we find partial support for the conventional wisdom. We find that relationships are more durable when the player and club negotiate a new salary rather than having a salary imposed by an arbitrator. Specifically, 11 percent of players who settle voluntarily are not with the same team by the end of the season. On average, this probability of a break-up increases by 10 percentage points when a player goes to arbitration, even after controlling for prior player performance and other factors. In other words, arbitration nearly doubles the likelihood of a player not being with the same team at the end of the season.

But do players who go to arbitration have lower on-field performance? Not that we can observe. There are no statistically significant differences in on-field performance between players who go to arbitration and those who settle voluntarily. This might be due to longer-term career concerns. Most arbitration-eligible players are early in their careers and their on-field performance is visible to other clubs. So they have incentives to set aside any residual feelings from the dispute-resolution process and to perform at a high level in order to position themselves for a lucrative, subsequent contract.

We are unable to observe the exact reasons underlying these results. It might be the case that financial concerns cause teams to trade or release players who win in arbitration, but it is harder to see how a purely financial reason would explain the result that the relationship is also less durable when the player loses and the club has to pay a lower salary. Rather, the pattern of results is consistent with scenarios in which the arbitration process harms the player-club relationship and negatively affects player behaviors that are hard to observe (e.g., clubhouse attitude, loyalty to the team), but career concerns and/or loyalty to teammates and fans causes a player to continue to publicly perform at his usual level. Such a scenario can be generalized into an hypothesis that could be applied to other settings—that is, the effect of a dispute resolution procedure will be smaller on dimensions of performance that are valued and easily observed by potential, future partners and larger where performance is harder for future potential partners to observe.

While the data come from the context of professional baseball, these results are important for dispute resolution researchers and practitioners with implications beyond professional baseball. The claimed superiority of voluntary dispute resolution procedures is neither uniformly rejected nor supported. Additional research and perhaps some re-thinking of longstanding assumptions are therefore needed.

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Source: John W. Budd, Aaron J. Sojourner, and Jaewoo Jung (forthcoming) “Are Voluntary Agreements Better? Evidence from Baseball Arbitration,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review. Here is the journal link or the full paper.

The Goals of Conflict Management: Have We Lost the Forest for the Trees?

Earlier this month I attended the International Associationfor Conflict Management (IACM) annual conference outside of Leiden in the Netherlands (Hup Holland Hup!). The diversity of presentations was stimulating, including topics ranging from the very micro (e.g., individual interactions) to the very macro (e.g., international diplomacy and peacebuilding), with mid-range team, organizational, and industrial relations conflict topics, too. There was much to be learned about managing conflict, but I kept coming back to one concern—have we lost the forest for the trees? Specifically, have we lost sight of the fundamental goals of conflict management?

The goals of conflict management don’t get a lot of explicit attention, but when pushed I think many would say that a conflict management system should prevent conflict and settle disputes quickly. Sounds good at first, but this is hardly adequate. As a manager I could devise a system whereby anyone who comes to me with a conflict is fired. That would likely prevent conflict and settle disputes quickly. But it hardly seems like a desirable approach to conflict management. So we need to think more carefully about metrics and goals for conflict management systems.

In the Oxford Handbook of Conflict Management in Organizations, that should be in print very soon, Alex Colvin and I have authored the lead chapter titled “The Goals and Assumptions of Conflict Management in Organizations.” We use the trilogy of efficiency, equity, and voice as a framework for considering the goals of conflict management. Our focus is conflict management in organizations, which I will follow below, but I think this could be applied more widely.

Firstly, efficiency. The effective management of conflict is important so that conflict minimizes disruptions to the productive efficiency of an organization. Whether overt or quietly festering, clashes between supervisors and subordinates, co-workers, union leaders and managers, or other organizational actors can be disruptive and undermine individual and organizational performance. A conflict management system should be able resolve these conflicts so that they are removed as barriers to performance. Another aspect of efficiency as a goal of conflict management is that it is desirable to resolve conflicts in an efficient way. Specifically, an efficient conflict resolution system conserves scarce resources, especially time and money. But efficiency by itself is not enough.

So secondly, equity. Equitable conflict management systems reflect concerns with justice, fairness, and due process such that outcomes are linked to objective pieces of evidence and which include safeguards that prevent arbitrary or capricious decision-making. Moreover, an equitable conflict management system treats all participants with respect, sensitivity, and privacy while also generating appropriate and effective remedies when rights are violated. The equity dimension can also include the extent to which a conflict management system has widespread coverage independent of resources or expertise.

Thirdly, voice. This captures our assertion that conflict management systems should be participatory. A system that is unilaterally designed and administered by managers lacks voice. In contrast, a system shaped by the input of employees as well as employers scores higher on the voice dimension. Similarly, participation in the actual conflict management system is an important element of voice.

So it’s important that academics and practitioners continue to find better ways to resolving conflicts. But we shouldn’t lose sight of what “better” means. It’s more than just understanding interpersonal dynamics that prevent conflicts. It's more than finding ways to quickly resolve disputes. We think a better system is one that fulfills efficiency, equity, and voice. Others might prefer other goals and metrics—probably rooted in alternative frames of reference (another part of our chapter, and perhaps the subject of a future blog posting). Regardless of one’s specific goals, it’s important to carefully think about them, and articulate them explicitly. Otherwise, we’re likely to lose sight of what we are actually trying to achieve.