Conflicted About Conflict: Learning How To Make Conflict Useful

Resolving Conflicted Feelings About Conflict By Developing Conflict Competence

One of the most striking impressions about conflict in America is the great contradiction in the way it is simultaneouslyl valued and feared. Most Americans do not doubt the importance of the freedom to express differences. In a society that places freedom of speech as an inalienable right to all citizens, few ideas are as unassailable as the right to disagree.

On the other hand, expression of differences takes on a decidedly more negative cast when labeled as conflict. Conflict is so universally considered a problem that its field of study is called conflict resolution; it is something problematic that must be fixed, put back together, resolved.

Research shows that difficulty resolving conflict can be an expensive problem. The Institute for Legal Reform says the cost of lawsuits in the United States “totals $261 billion a year, or $880 per person”, according to a 2006 research study by Tillinghast-Towers Perrin (2006).

This is not to say that those who file lawsuits do not have legitimate grievances. It does suggest that people feel more confident having a paid professional “fight” for them, rather than engaging directly with another to resolve an important conflict. Whether it is a matter of differences in the workplace, in a marriage, or in the neighborhood, increasing numbers of Americans become so upset that they do not trust their own ability to work through a conflict constructively.

I do not believe the presence of conflict a bad thing. I don’t think increasingly levels of conflict is necessarily a bad thing. It’s our love-hate relationship with conflict that doesn’t serve us well. I belive our conflicted feelings about conflict are the real problem — not conflict itself — but our difficulty in accepting it as part of every day life.

Conflicted feelings about conflict

Look at the clichés we use regarding conflict. On the one hand, society instructs people to be nice, even to the extent that “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” On the other hand, Americans are taught early and repeatedly through life to “stand up for yourself,” show some backbone, and even, that “fight makes right.”

Vigorous debate is a hallmark of American culture. An entire discipline within the field of communications is dedicated to argumentation. Most high school students can join a debate team and become proficient in rhetorical contests. At the same time, one study shows that “fear of expressing disagreement” (Conduit, 2001, p. 347) at work can be such a powerful influence that it can predict coronary heart disease. Employees can be so afraid of voicing contrary opinions that they adopt passive-aggressive strategies in which he or she “doesn’t act or speak out openly,’’ (Gaines, 1996, p. 13) but instead, expresses anger indirectly by undermining performance.

How can such diametrically opposed ideas about conflict be true at once? How can U.S. organizations be so adept at handling conflict that it improves productivity, but at the same time, be so dysfunctional that it contributes to heart disease?  The answer is that Americans have conflicted feelings about conflict and old approaches to conflict no longer work.

Neither fight or flight is the best answer. Instead, we must develop conflict competence.

Neither aggressive debate nor conflict avoidance is helpfup in solving complex problems; instead, people must become comfortable with conflict to become competent handlers of it throughout their lives. It should be taught in homes, schools, and workplaces and considered an essential skill, an art, and a science for every citizen of what is likely the most diverse country in the world. It should be considered – not as conflict resolution – but as conflict competence. The ability to clearly and amicably express differences, to find ways to understand and meet the interests of many perspectives is essential to human progress in the modern age.

Our Challenges With Conflict

While watching the news one may get the impression that the only people routinely confronting differences are political leaders debating the great issues of the day. The truth is that conflict is an ever-present factor in all parts of life. Just as clichés show contradictory attitudes toward conflict, so do the volumes of published work over the last twenty years. A search of books about conflict on Amazon.com, yielded a list of more than 420,000.

Titles that demonstrate difficulty with conflict include: Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In, A Safe Place for Dangerous Truths: Using Dialogue to Overcome Fear & Distrust at Work, You Just Don’t Understand, The Dance of Anger, and most tellingly, The Coward’s Guide to Conflict: Empowering Solutions for Those Who Would Rather Run Than Fight. These titles suggest that we are afraid that if we don’t fight, we’ll give in, that truth at work can be dangerous, that people don’t understand us, and that anger and cowardice are likely to accompany our experiences with conflict.

When Is Conflict Useful?

“The thunderbolt of conflict carries the power of both destruction and creation,” says Brian Muldoon (1996) in The Heart of Conflict. This quote expresses well the dichotomy of conflict.

Understanding how to harness the benefits of conflict without unleashing its destructive potential is the crux of questions on how to resolve differences. Finding ways to positively engage differences has become crucially important to employers, public leaders, educators, and anyone affected by destructive conflict. As a result, considerable research has been conducted in the last ten years documenting specific behavior, communication, attitudes and approaches that lead to effective conflict outcomes.

Research shows factors that cause conflicts in groups to be either destructive or beneficial. While earlier researchers asserted that the mere presence of conflict, or the level of conflict, or type of conflict, determined the positive or negative outcome of conflict, many researchers today say those factors do not make the defining difference.

Instead, they say, the outcome depends on the way conflict is managed. Research shows that when group participants employ an active, positive approach that welcomes differences and uses problem-solving to create mutually-satisfying solutions, they will reap rewards such as:

* increased quality of decision-making,
* deeper commitment to solutions,
* better group member relationships,
* higher levels of creativity and even improved adherence to budget and deadlines.

These findings can make a big difference to individuals, groups, workplace, and communities struggling with damaging conflict. The studies show people can learn to approach conflict not as a problem to be avoided or conquered, but as an opportunity to be realized. By developing conflict competence people become comfortable with the discomfort of conflict and become adept at strategies that yield positive results.

Conclusion

The most significant amount of empirical research and writing comparing effective and ineffective approaches to conflict appears in literature on corporate work teams. While textbooks in interpersonal communications have made theorectical distinctions between constructive vs. destructive conflict, it has only been in the last few years that studies have begun to more specifically document what leads to one type of conflict versus the other. It is this body of research that holds the most promise for developing conflict competence.

Because conflict can have such powerfully beneficial or harmful effects, and because people have yet to master its use, research findings on specific behaviors that lead to positive conflict outcomes should be taught in schools, workplaces, social institutions and popular culture.

Author’s note: This is a condensed version of a full article, with research citations, from the sources listed below. For further information on this article, please contact Beth Smith at bsmith@CollaborativeSolutions.us and see my website: http://www.CollaborativeSolutions.us

References

Amason, A. C., Ensley, M. D., Pearson, A. W. 2002. An assessment and refinement of Jehn’s intragroup conflict scale. International Journal of Conflict Management, 13 (2), 110-127.

Conduit, E. (2001). Submissiveness and risk of heart disease. Cross Cultural Research, 35 (4), 347-370.
DeChurch, L. A., & Marks, M. A. (2001). Maximizing the benefits of task conflict: The role of conflict management. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 12 (1), 4-22.

Folger, J.P., Poole, M.S., Stutman, R.K. (2001). Working through conflict: Strategies for relationships, groups and organizations. New York: Longman.

Gaines, L. (1996). Surviving those passive-aggressive employees. Executive Female, 19 (2), 13-16.
Isenhart, M.W., & Spangle, M. (2000). Collaborative approaches to resolving conflict. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Jehn, K. (2001). The influence of proportional and perceptual conflict composition on team performance. International Journal of Conflict Management, 11 (1), 144-168.

Jehn, K., Chadwick, C., Thatcher, S. (1997). To agree or not to agree: The effects of value congruence, individual demographic dissimilarity, and conflict on  workgroup outcomes. International Journal of Conflict Management, 8 (4) 287-306.

Lovelace, K., Shapiro, D.L., Weingaart, L.R. (2001). Maximizing cross-functional new product teams’ innovativeness and constraint adherence: A conflict communications perspective. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 779-894.

Mallin, I., & Anderson, K.V. (2000). Inviting Constructive Argument. Argumentation & Advocacy, 36 (3), 120-134.

Muldoon, B. (1996). The Heart of Conflict. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons.

Simons, T.L. &  Peterson, R.S. (2000). Task conflict and relationship conflict in top management teams: The pivotal role of intragroup trust. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85 (1), 102-111.

Smith, K.A., Petersen, R.P., Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T. (1986). The effects of controversy and concurrence seeking on effective decision making. Journal of Social Psychology, 126 (2), 237 – 248.

Are Humans Getting Any Better At Getting Along?

Let Me Introduce Myself

Are We Making Progress In Working Together to Solve Problems? How Can We Tell?

I start this blog with a lifetime interest in attempting to make a difference in the world while being alternately disappointed and then hopeful at the prospects. Most of the time I believe passionately in the ability of humans to make positive, forward progress, and am convinced that in the bigger picture of our species’ history, we are evolving toward more constructive ways of resolving differences and creating better lives for all people.

But some days, I’m not so sure. I wonder what others think. What evidence might we cite to demonstrate that humans are learning and developing our capacities for getting along? (Of course we bombarded daily by evidence of the opposite proposition — that humans are increasing violent and intransigent.) I’m interested in data and demonstrations that we are indeed changing for the better. I am interested in collecting, sharing, and building knowledge about how we are creating genuine change. For instance, one of the most difficult questions, under investigation in several disciplines is, “how do humans change deeply ingrained behavior?”

Gandhi and MLK: Using Non-Violent Conflict As Powerful Tools of Change

In college I was inspired by the ‘rhetoric of dissent’ –powerful speakers, like Martin Luther King and Mohatma Gandhi, who truly changed the world through the power of language, ideas, and courageous collective action. With incredible thoughtfulness and dignity they used conflict in the most constructive manner possible, to create profound change. Their primary impulse was to create change; their moves to do so created conflict. It was not conflict that came first, but the positive vision. In moving toward the goal and bumping against existing structures, conflict was sparked. Gandhi and King made conscious choices, over and over again, to resist human instincts of fight or flight. They inspired legions of others to do the same. I, myself, was motivated by their thinking and their action.

Electing Candidates to Office: Politics as a Vehicle to Change

I spent the first part of my career attempting to make a positive difference in the world by working in national politics and government. For 12 years I served in communications positions, working for candidates and office holders, including my first job as press secretary to Bill Richardson (New Mexico) in his first run for Congrees, and four years as a press secretary for U.S. Senator Gary Hart in Washington D.C.

In the beginning I believed that communicating the most compelling arguments would move people divided by differences of opinion on important issues. Years later I came to see that our system of reasoned debate on important public issues no longer functions as a constructive search for better solutions. Instead we are gridlocked by our differences. Destructive conflict on an institutional scale is a severe impediment to affecting change on crucial public problems.

Other Vehicles for Creating Meaningful Change

I did not leave politics and government believing that politicians are to blame, or that government is to blame. Throughout my time in Washington I worked with people who were very bright, well educated, and genuinely dedicated to making positive contributions, whatever their ideological leanings. What struck me most about working in Washington was the way people communicated, or rather, failed to communicate. Everybody was a speech giver or speech maker. Our nation’s capital seemed to be a place in which everybody was speaking to people “out there,” but “inside the beltway,” no one was listening, no one was interacting. I was disappointed not only in our political and governmental processes, but I had also grown tired of my craft. One-way communication had gotten old.

The American Leadership Forum: Collaborative Leadership

Living in Denver, in 1991 I had a great opportunity to explore questions about social change, conflict, and communication. I went to work for the American Leadership Forum, a national non-profit organization founded by Joseph Jaworski. As the son of Watergate Special Prosecutor Leon Jaworski, the younger Jaworski felt an acute need to find alternative ways for tackling social division, change and leadership. After an intense and broad ranging investigation with prominent thinkers in a variety of fields, Jaworski created ALF in the early 1980s as a vehicle for bringing together leaders from government, business, and non-profits to work together on community problems.

By 1989 Jaworski had gone on to work for Royal Dutch Shell, but “his intuitive sense for the need for collaboration in communities and the nation” (Chrislip and Larson, 1994), resulted in ALF chapters that are still active today, and contributed to an emerging field of community collaboration. The work had attracted the interest of two large foundations that commissioned research on the effectiveness of ALF and other efforts at cross-sector collaboration in the U.S.

Real Results with Collaboration

The MacArthur and Luce foundations provided grants to investigate the characteristics of collaborative initiatives that made significant public improvements in American cities. Working with David Chrislip (of ALF) and Carl Larson (of the University of Denver), I conducted primary research, interviewing dozens of community leaders and citizens involved in large-scale collaborative initiatives. I was so inspired by the people, the process, and the results of these endeavors that I started by own facilitation and training practice, Collaborative Solutions, in 1991.

Certainly the principles of collaboration appealed to me – inclusiveness, relationships, constructive conflict, shared leadership, interactive communication – but what was equally compelling was its usefulness. As David Chrislip and Carl Larson say in the book that emerged from this research project, “people are learning to work together. They are working together because they have to; nothing else works to solve problems or improve performance” (1994).

Collaboration As A Distinctly Different, Constructive Approach

As someone who had been disappointed in the effectiveness of our political process to deal productively with conflict and instigate meaningful change, I found collaboration (in its many forms) to be a compelling and realistic new approach to public problems. Collaboration is defined by Chrislip and Larson in very specific terms:

“That concept, as we use it, goes beyond communication, cooperation, and coordination. As its Latin roots – com and laborare – indicate, it means ‘to work together.’ It is a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more parties who work toward common goals by sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability for achieving results. Collaboration is more than simply sharing information (communication) and more than a relationship that helps each party achieve its own goals (cooperation and coordination). The purpose of collaboration is to create a shared vision and joint strategies to address concerns that go beyond the purview of any particular party. (1994, p. 5)

Starting My Own Company: Collaborative Solutions

Since 1991 I have worked as a facilitator, mediator, trainer, and consultant helping organizations solve problems and create meaningful change. My company name, “Collaborative Solutions” indicates my belief in collaboration as the organizing process in resolving conflict, building teams, achieving organizational change, addressing public issues, and finding new ways to deal with complex, multi-sector, global problems.

The word ‘solutions’ in my company name is not meant to imply that I have the answers. Solutions are the result of a collaborative effort – the particular goals and outcomes achieved by people working together. I see collaboration not as the end, but the means to whatever ends people hope to achieve.

Some Disappointing Realities: Too Much Collaboration or Too Little Learning?

While I have been very encouraged over the last 17 years by the proliferation of professional fields involved in the same kind of work, I have often felt like a person ‘without a country.’ I have not found one discipline, one framework, or group of professionals that have the complete picture for resolving conflict and creating meaningful change. Sometimes I’ve been disappointed in trying to speak with professionals in one context about work in other contexts.

Often language and models are so dissimilar that conceptual links cannot be made. It seems to me that communications trainers, organizational consultants, ADR mediators, and multi-stakeholder facilitators, are all talking about the same kinds of things, but cannot share knowledge because they use different languages.

Can Collaborators Collaborate to Advance Learning?

Building a Shared “Mental Model”

Over the last three years I have worked in my spare time on an effort to forge some conceptual bonds, link models and create shared language among those working in collaborative fields and endeavors. I’ve been building a framework of the various theorists, concepts, models, words, practices, and tools being studied and practiced across disciplines such as education, business, public policy, natural resources, health care, and environmental protection.

Sometime soon I hope to share this framework and turn it into a wiki that can be built collaboratively, of course. It’s really quite an undertaking and does much to suggest we are making progress, developing capacity, and increasing knowledge about the last great unchartered frontier of our time — human relationships and the forces that push us toward destruction or brilliant achievement. My most idealistic hope is that this framework might serve as a “shared mental model” that will help us surface assumptions, challenge those assumptions, uncover ‘repeatable’ experiments, document ‘evidence-based’ findings, and identify gaps in understanding.

I hope this blog will serve as a forum to help make some of the connections between disperate collaborative communities, toiling away without the benefit of others’ experience. I do not claim to have the answers myself, only the motivation to connect the many who do have some part of some answers. At heart I am a learner, a communicator, a facilitator, a connector, an integrator of ideas. If you have some intriguing notions that connect theories in one field to another, let me know.

I will be writing about connections authors and researchers are making, discoveries and findings, interesting propositions and surprising studies that shed new light. Some specific topics will include conflict, communication, collaboration, interpersonal relations, organizational change, leadership development, performance improvement, emotional intelligence, systems thinking, dialogue, organizational learning, problem-solving processes, and many others.

Conclusion: Using Conflict Constructively = Collaboration

At the beginning I mentioned MLK and Ghandi. What do they have to do with all the words that followed? The point I don’t want to lose is that they saw conflict as a constructive, positive force for change. They did not see conflict as violence. They were highly competent in creating tension between an ideal vision of the future and the less than perfect reality. The conflict between the two created enormous energy for change. Yes, violence occurred along the way, despite powerful and consistent exhortations against it. Their behavior, however, motivated tens of thousands of others to behave peacefully, yet confidently in asserting their specific requests for change. Theirs was the kind of communication, behavior, and basic understanding about people’s tendency to violently defend, if attacked, that we can all learn from. Not just in great matters of justice and equality, but in the coffee line, on the soccer field, in the office, and everywhere one set of interests pushes against another set of interests.

Communication and Constructive Conflict

And the connection between conflict and collaboration? I am convinced that much of our difficulties in getting along with others are due to conflicted feelings about conflict. It is so uncomfortable for some that any sign of disagreement indicates a relationship, project, or organization in trouble. In recent years, as collaborative approaches have been discovered by corporations, schools, the courts, science, technology, and even adolescent techniques in socialization, collaboration is often viewed as the antidote for conflict. It is not.

In fact, collaboration requires conflict — constructive conflict of the kind advocated by Gandhi and MLK. We must assert our differences and bring attention to key beliefs and assumptions that lurk below our consciousness and drive behavior. Communicating clearly and positively about ourselves, what we want, what we perceive open the way for understanding and effective action. Simply focusing on others, and what is wrong with them, is rightly felt to be an attack, and usually marks the beginning of a dysfunctional spiral of ineffective behavior and destructive conflict.

This is the crux of the challenge in improving human progress and our ability to get along. I’ll have more to offer in later posts on the specifics of this challenge. For the moment, I suggest one of the best models I have seen in practice, with strong evidence of success in the research literature, is labeled “constructive controversy” by authors Johnson and Johnson. The key, they say, is that individuals must “be able to criticize another person’s ideas while confirming his or her competence and worth to see the issue from all perspectives” (Johnson, D. W., & Johnson, R. T., 2000, p. 303). More on this later.

Because of the work of these authors and scores of serious studies of human interaction, conflict, communication, and collaboration, my answer to the question posed at the outset is yes, we humans are getting better at getting along.

I look forward to hearing from others who share my passion in for these topics.

Warm Regards,

Beth Smith

Collaborative Solutions

http://www.CollaborativeSolutions.us

bsmith@CollaborativeSolutions.us