Too hot to handle? How to manage relationship conflict

California Management Review

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 6-31

  Edmondson, Amy C ^a   Smith, Diana McLain ^b  

^a HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL   (United States)

^b Action Design ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33845479692     PISSN: 00081256     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/41166369     Document Type: Review

References (64)

1. For compelling arguments in favor of senior executive teams, see D. Ancona and D. Nadler, "Top Hats and Executive Tales: Designing the Senior Team," Shan Management Review, 31/1 (Fall 1989): 19-29;
2. D. Nadler, "Managing the Team at the Top," strategy+business, 2 (First Quarter 1996): 42-51.
3. More recently, Edmondson, Roberto, and Watkins reviewed research on benefits and risks of top management teams (TMTs) and introduced a model in which TMTs need strong process management to achieve their potential. See A.C. Edmondson, M.A. Roberto, and M.D. Watkins, "A Dynamic Model of Top Management Team Effectiveness: Managing Unstructured Task Streams," Leadership Quarterly, 14/3 (June 2003): 297-325.
4. See A.C. Amason, "Distinguishing the Effects of Functional and Dysfunctional Conflict on Strategic Decision Making: Resolving a Paradox for Top Management Teams," Academy of Management Journal, 39/1 (February 1996): 123-148;
5. B. Wooldridge and S.W Floyd, "The Strategy Process, Middle Management Involvement, and Organizational Performance," Strategic Management Journal, 11/3 (March/April 1990): 231-241;
6. K.M. Eisenhardt, "Making Fast Strategic Decisions in High Velocity Environments," Academy of Management Journal, 32/3 (September 1989): 543-576;
7. K.M. Eisenhardt, J.L. Kahwajy, L.J. Bourgeois, "How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight," Harvard Business Review, 75/4 (July/August 1997): 77-85.
8. In the research literature, task conflict is conceptualized as intellectual or cognitive rather than emotional. Relationship conflict, in contrast, is emotional, including such terms as "interpersonal incompatibility" and "tension, annoyance, or animosity among group members." In particular, see K. Jehn, "A Multimethod Examination of the Benefits and Detriments of Intragroup Conflict," Administrative Science Quarterly, 40/2 (June 1995): 256-282.
9. De Dreu and Van Vianen defined relationship conflicts as involving interpersonal issues and personal taste. C.K.W. De Dreu and A.E.M. Van Vianen, "Managing Relationship Conflict and the Effectiveness of Organizational Teams," Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22/3 (May 2001): 309-328.
10. Amason similarly argued that relationship or affective conflict involves personal disputes and is dysfunctional. See Amason, op cit. Eisenhardt, Kahwajy, and Bourgeois argued that separating substantive and interpersonal issues, so as to rely on facts, helps teams work with conflict effectively. See Eisenhardt et al., Journal of Organizational Behavior, op cit.
11. Most research relies upon survey measures to support this argument. In short, these studies show that task conflict is associated with better performance, and relationship conflict is associated with poor performance, and so researchers have generally concluded that rela-tionship conflict should be avoided (e.g., Jehn, Amason, and De Dreu and Van Vianen). This article does not dispute the correlational findings, and we concur that, on average, without skill or strategies for coping with relationship conflict, teams exhibiting frequent relationship conflict will have weaker performance. We argue simply that relationship conflict is more difficult to avoid than prior work has implied and that, with careful attention to process, relationship conflict can be managed in ways that help teams realize benefits from it. It is also important to note that later work, building on Jehn and Amason, found that task and relationship conflict tend to co-occur, which is consistent with our argument that they are difficult to separate in practice. Further, they find that task conflict quickly turns into relationship conflict when people do things such as raise their voices. Simons and Peterson argued that trust helps prevent task conflict from turning personal, an observation that is difficult to act upon but is consistent with our argument in this article. Our aim is to describe managerial practices that help teams establish that trust and, more important, learn about substantive views in productive ways, so as to keep disagreements from turning dysfunc-tional. See Amason, Journal of Organizational Behavior, op. cit.;
12. Jehn, Journal of Organizational Behavior, op cit;
13. T. Simon and R. Peterson, "Task Conflict and Relationship Conflict in Top Management Teams: The Pivotal Role of Intragroup Trust," Journal of Applied Psychology, 85/1 (February 2000): 102-111;
14. De Dreu and Van Vianen, Journal of Applied Psychology, op. cit.
15. Most recently, Van der Vegt and Bunderson found that survey measures of task and relationship conflict had a correlation of almost .90 in their study of project teams and so they combined them into a single measure, "conflict." See G.S. Van der Vegt and S.R. Bunderson, "Learning and Performance in Multidisciplinary Teams: The Importance of Collective Team Identification," Academy of Management Journal, 48/3 (July 2005): 532-547.
16. Simons and Peterson argued that trust reduces the occurrence of relationship conflict following task conflict, and Jehn and Mannix found that open communication helped teams cope with task conflict but made relationship conflict worse. Finally, Thompson proposed that relationship conflict could be transformed into task conflict by emphasizing shared goals and learning about others interests. Consistent with the spirit of our findings, Thompson also advocated training groups to process conflict effectively by starting with low stakes issues-what we term "cool" topics. We go further than this prior work in being specific about the behavioral practices through which teams can productively identify shared goals, learn about others interests, and make decisions, while engaging relationship conflict directly. See Simons and Peterson, Academy of Management Journal, op. cit.;
17. K. Jehn and E. Mannix, "The Dynamic Nature of Conflict: A Longitudinal Study of Intragroup Conflict and Group Performance," Academy of Management Journal, 44/2 (April 2001): 238-251;
18. Thompson, Making the Team: A Guide for Managers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003).
19. For example, it is harder to say with any certainty what will or won't happen two to three years from now than it is to say what is happening now or what has happened in the past.
20. For research on management attributions in real situations, see C. Argyris, Reasoning, Learning and Action: Individual and Organizational (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1982);
21. C. Argyris, R.W. Putnam, and D.M. Smith, Action Science (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1985).
22. Through qualitative analysis of managerial conversation, Argyris and his colleagues explore the unspoken negative attributions that managers make about each other's intentions or abilities. For experimental research on the robustness of this phenomenon, see G. Marks and N. Miller, "Ten Years of Research on the False Consensus Effect: An Empirical and Theoretical Review," Psychological Bulletin, 102/1 (July 2987): 72-90.
23. In laboratory research, social psychologists also have investigated the unflattering nature of causal attributions about other people's behavior. See, for example, R. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice Hall, 1980);
24. D.T. Gilbert and P.S. Malone, "The Correspondence Bias," Psychological Bulletin, 117/1 (January 1995): 21-38;
25. M. Ross and G.J.O. Fletcher, "Attribution and Social Perception," in G. Lindzey and E. Aronson, eds., The Handbook of Social Psychology, 3rd edition (New York, NY: Random House, 1985).
26. See L. Ross, "False Consensus Effect," Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13/3 (May 1977): 279-301.
27. L. Ross, ""The Intuitive Psychologist and His Shortcomings," in L. Berkowitz, ed.. Advances in Experimental Psychology, Volume 10 (New York, NY: Academic Press, 1977), p. 405.
28. C. Argyris and D. Schön, Organizational Learning: A Theory of Action Perspective (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1978).
29. Our ideas are not intended to extend to conflicts rooted in historically opposed ethnic-groups or other identity group derived differences, which appears from the relevant literature to he the type of conflict most likely to spawn self-reinforcing, dysfunctional conflicts that defy remediation. Our framework and practices apply to work teams in which shared organizational goals do exist, even if at times they fail to dominate people's thoughts or actions.
30. See M.P. Follett, "Constructive Conflict," in P. Graham, ed., Prophet of Management (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996).
31. Argyris, Putnam, and Smith, Prophet of Management op. cit.
32. All company and individual names used in this article are pseudonyms.
33. Ross (1977b), op. cit.
34. Argyris, Putnam, and Smith (op. cit.) provide more detail on this interpersonal dynamic between managers, in which merely focusing on different data points quickly leads people to different conclusions, each without consciousness that their own conclusions are not necessarily "right."
35. See J. Metcalfe and W. Mischel, "A Hot/Cool System of Delay of Gratification: Dynamics of Willpower," Psychological Review, 106/1 (1999): 3-19.
36. J. Metcalfe and W. Mischel, "A Hot/Cool System of Delay of Gratification: Dynamics of Willpower," Psychological Review, 106/1 (1999): 3-19. Ibid.
37. Frames are taken for granted cognitions that go largely unnoticed, making it hard not to act on them. See A.C. Edmondson, "Framing for Learning: Lessons in Successful Technology Implementation," California Management Review, 45/2 (Winter 2003): 34-54.
38. For foundational research that gave rise to this insight, see C. Argyris and D. Schön, Theory in Practice: increasing Professional Effectiveness (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1974).
39. See D. Smith, "Keeping a Strategic Dialogue Moving," 〈www.actiondesign.com/resources/theory/ksdm.htm〉. Maxie Maultsby, a pioneer in the field of rational behavior therapy, emphasizes the need for refraining to improve individual psychological health and results. Larry Wilson has developed these ideas further in the realm of organizational change.
40. D.M. Smith, "Different Portraits of Medical Practice," in R. Sawa, ed., Family Health Care (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1992), pp. 105-130:
41. D. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983);
42. M.C. Maultsby, Rational Behavior Therapy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984):
43. L. Wilson and H. Wilson, Play to Win: Choosing Growth over Fear in Work and Life (Bard Press, Inc., 1998);
44. P.S. Brønn and R.W. Berg, eds., Corporate Communication: A Strategic Approach to Building Reputation (Oslo: Gydendahl, 2002);
45. C. Argyris and D. Schön (1974), Corporate Communication: A Strategic Approach to Building Reputation op. cit.;
46. R. Nisbett and L. Ross, Corporate Communication: A Strategic Approach to Building Reputation op. cit.
47. C. Argyris (1982), Corporate Communication: A Strategic Approach to Building Reputation op. cit.
48. See D. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1983).
49. Metcalfe and Mischel, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action op. cit.;
50. P. McArthur, R. Putnam, and D.M. Smith, "Climbing out of the Muck: How Self-Reflecting Teams Can Help You Break Free of Your Own Recurring Impasses," in P.M. Senge, A. Kleiner, C. Roberts, G. Roth, R. Ross, and B. Smith, eds., The Dance of Change: The Challenges to Sustaining Momentum in Learning Organizations (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1999), pp. 120-127.
51. See C. Argyris, Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990).
52. For quantitative research on top management teams that supported this statement, see Simons and Peterson, Overcoming Organizational Defenses: Facilitating Organizational Learning op. cit.
53. See, for example, A.C. Edmondson and A.W. Woolley, "Understanding Outcomes of Organizational Learning Interventions," in M. Easterby-Smith and M. Lyles, eds., International Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge Management (London: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 185-211.
54. In geology, faults are cracks in the Earth's crust that result from differential motion within the crust, and faultlines are areas of intense pressure and heat, with the potential to erupt into earthquakes, volcanic activity, or tidal waves. In the management literature, Lau and Murnighan have introduced the term faultlines to describe a phenomenon in small groups in which two or more identity groups in a team show a high degree of overlap (e.g., gender and functional affiliation), increasing the chances of conflict. Our term instead captures those boundaries in organizations that, if not well connected to each other, have the potential to give rise to serious divisions in the firm and lost potential. See D.C Lau and J.K. Murnighan, "Interactions within Groups and Subgroups: The Effects of Demographic Faultlines," Academy of Management Journal, 48/4 (August 2005): 645-659.
55. See F. Rose, West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (New York, NY: Penguin, 1989);
56. J. Sculley, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple: A Journey of Adventures, Ideas, and the Future (New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1987).
57. See Edmondson, Roberto, and Watkins, Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple: A Journey of Adventures, Ideas, and the Future op. cit.;
58. A.C. Edmondson, "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams," Administrative Science Quarterly, 44/2 (June 1999): 350-383.
59. See Edmondson (1999), Administrative Science Quarterly, op. cit.;
60. A.C. Edmondson, "The Local and Variegated Nature of Learning in Organizations: A Group-Level Perspective," Organization Science, 13/2 (March/April 2002): 128-146.
61. See D. Goleman, Emotional intelligence (New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1995).
62. See T. Casciaro and S.L. Miquel, "Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks," Harvard Business Review, 83/6 (June 2005): 92-99.
63. Some prior research has suggested that higher status team members, such as those with formal authority, must take the initial risks for others to believe they are acceptable in a team. We agree that this is helpful, while encouraging all members to experiment with small risks. See A.C. Edmondson, R. Bohmer, and G.P. Pisano, "Speeding Up Team Learning," Harvard Business Review, 79/9 (October 2001): 125-134;
64. A.C. Edmondson, "Speaking Up in the Operating Room: How Team Leaders Promote Learning in Interdisciplinary Action Teams," Journal of Management Studies, 40/6 (September 2003): 1419-1452.