The Critical Role of Conflict Resolution in Teams: A Close Look at the Links Between Conflict
Type, Conflict Management Strategies, and Team Outcomes
By: Jalal Maqableh
Citation: Behfar, K. J., Peterson, R. S., Mannix, E. A., & Trochim, W. M. (2008). The
critical role of conflict resolution in teams: a close look at the links between conflict
type, conflict management strategies, and team outcomes. Journal of applied
psychology, 93(1), 170.
In-text: (Behfar, Peterson, Mannix, & Trochim, 2008)
- This article explores the linkages between strategies for managing different types of
conflict and group performance and satisfaction.
- Results from a qualitative study of 57 autonomous teams suggest that groups that improve
or maintain top performance over time share 3 conflict resolution tendencies:
1. focusing on the content of interpersonal interactions rather than delivery style,
2. explicitly discussing reasons behind any decisions reached in accepting and distributing
work assignments, and
3. assigning work to members who have the relevant task expertise rather than assigning
by other common means such as volunteering, default, or convenience.
- The authors’ results also suggest that teams that are successful over time are likely to be
both proactive in anticipating the need for conflict resolution and pluralistic in developing
conflict resolution strategies that apply to all group members.
Strategies
- Voting- Majority Rules
- Compromise of Census- Discussed it and reached a census
- Discuss or Debate- Discussed Pros and cons
- Open Communication- Everyone discussed it and came to a conclusion together
- Idiosyncratic Solutions-Creating Rules and Micromanaging
- Avoided or Ignored- Working around conflict
- Rotating Responsibilities-Shared responsibility because no one can agree
HOW DO YOU MANGAGE CONFLICT?
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The Critical Role of Conflict Resolution in Teams: A Close Look at the Links Between Conflict
Type, Conflict Management Strategies, and Team Outcomes
By: Jalal Maqableh
Research Questions
- How do some teams manage relationship conflict and avoid its usual negative impact,
while others do not?
- Are there particular conflict resolution tactics that allow for the effective resolution of
relation- ship conflict?
- Why does task conflict manifest itself as constructive debate in some teams but as open
fighting in other teams?
- Are there specific conflict resolution tactics that a team can chose that will allow for
effective management of task conflict?
- Do certain conflict resolution tactics work across all types of conflict?
- Or does each type of conflict require different conflict resolution strategies?
Methods
Participants
- The research sample was the entire 1st-year MBA class of 252 students, or 65 study
teams, at an East Coast graduate school of management.
- The students were an average age of 29 years; 27% women, 73% men; 34% born outside
the United States; with an average of 4.7 years of full-time work experience after
completing undergraduate degrees in a wide range of managerial and technical positions.
- Groups were randomly assigned with 3–4 members.
Overview of Procedure
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The Critical Role of Conflict Resolution in Teams: A Close Look at the Links Between Conflict
Type, Conflict Management Strategies, and Team Outcomes
By: Jalal Maqableh
- Open-ended survey questions were used to gather the qualitative data
- We chose the open-ended survey format because it elicits brief yet detailed team member
accounts, minimizes demand characteristics because it does not constrain team members’
options to discuss certain types of conflict/management behaviors
- We chose not to use existing conflict management inventories in this study because we
were interested in capturing detail about team-level development and application of
different strategies to different types of conflict. Therefore, we rely on a more participant-
driven method of inquiry. Survey data were also collected to assess satisfaction.
Measures
- Surveys. The teams were administered two surveys that included both open-ended
questions and close-ended measures. The open-ended question asked respondents to
describe their team norms.
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The Critical Role of Conflict Resolution in Teams: A Close Look at the Links Between Conflict
Type, Conflict Management Strategies, and Team Outcomes
By: Jalal Maqableh
Findings
What is your strategy?
The results discovered how different types of conflict (task, relationship, or process) mesh with
choice of conflict resolution strategy and different outcome patterns. Also, reported how the
team norms patterns link to the outcome patterns to verify our outcome patterns.
- Linking Conflict Type, Conflict Management Strategies, and Outcome Patterns
- The results are reported below according to outcome patterns: (a) teams with consistently
high or increasing performance and satisfaction; (b) teams with consistently low or
decreasing performance and satisfaction; (c) teams with consistently high or increasing
performance but consistently low or decreasing satisfaction; and (d) teams with
consistently low or decreasing performance but consistently high or increasing
satisfaction. Overall, 21 teams, or 37% of the sample, demonstrated consistently high or
increasing outcome trends.
Conclusion
- The results of the summary analysis suggest that while teams may have reported using
strategies from the same conflict resolution categories, the way that they applied those
strategies to resolve different conflicts was often associated with very different patterns
of change in performance and satisfaction
Theoretical Contributions
There are two interrelated theoretical contributions this study makes.
- The first is to provide detail about how teams manage task, relationship, and process
conflicts as well as the performance and satisfaction tradeoffs associated with choices in
conflict resolution strategies.
- The second theoretical contribution of our work is to develop group-level theory about
conflict resolution strategies.
Limitations and Future Directions
- First, the categories of resolution strategies used by MBA students may not apply to all
work settings.
- The second limitation of our study revolves around group design. Our groups
had complete autonomy to self-manage, whereas most organizational groups
have team leaders or managers that are likely to provide some direction or
structure.
- The third limitation of our study revolves around the fact that performance
feedback was given in the form of a grade rather than a discussion of
performance as might be done in an organization.
- Finally, this study investigated only one performance episode. Future
investigations should investigate multiple waves of work– feedback cycles to
better assess causality between strategies and outcomes.
