by Nick Redding

A recently published study provides evidence of a phenomena that all organization development practitioners, or anyone working in an organization setting, will immediately recognize: 1) the social environment of the organization has a strong influence on employee relations – especially how often and to what extremes conflicts manifest and persist, and 2) the leader of the organization is the likely culprit. This is no secret in the world of organizational development, but surprisingly, there is a little data to support this commonly observed phenomena.

A new study surveyed employees and branch managers across 131 bank branches to establish empirical support for these observations. They specifically assess three conflict styles that apply to both individual branch leadership behaviors, as well as the branch conflict culture as rated by the employees. First, there is the dominating style, characterized by a norm for active disagreement, and by conflicts being resolved through the process of win/lose public confrontations. Just the opposite of this, the avoidant style sees conflicts as dangerous, with confrontations often avoided for the sake of maintaining group harmony. Finally, we have the collaborative conflict style, which embraces constructive conflict management – conflicts are opportunities to build cooperation, bolster team relations, and to improve the outcome of decisions.

The authors of this study found that indeed these distinct conflict cultures do exist, and they are related to the performance of the organization. Dominating cultures have low group cohesion, and poor customer service, while avoidant conflict cultures suffer from lower creativity. Collaborative conflict cultures, on the other hand, get things done. In these environments employees have better group cohesion with a stronger sense that the group can be productive, and these employees experience less burnout.

Most importantly, this study ties a direct link between the leader’s conflict behaviors and the conflict culture of the organization. Leaders, who approach conflict collaboratively, lead cultures that embrace this as well, while avoidant leaders tend to lead more conflict avoidant cultures. The story of the dominating style is a little different: while these leaders tend to reside in less conflict avoidant cultures, there is no evidence that the culture they lead will be a dominating one. This makes sense if we consider that a dominating leader may not leave much room in the culture for others to be dominating as well.

Conflict is part of all organization systems, and in fact, these systems thrive on conflicts that enhance the organization by integrating multiple perspectives. The task of those working in organization development it is not to help leaders minimize conflict, but to maximize the probability that a constructive and collaborative conflict culture will emerge – starting with the leader.