How Workplace Conflict Expression Shapes Team Performance

Workplace conflict has played a foundational role in theories about how people interact on the job. In a recent paper, researchers developed a new measure of how conflict is expressed among workers that highlights how the ways individuals voice their dissent vary in terms of their oppositional intensity and directness.

The article, “Conflict Expression Tendencies in Workgroups: Measure Validation and a Test of Theory,” includes several studies conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, Indiana University (IU), the University of California, Los Angeles, California State University, Stony Brook University, the University of Melbourne, INSEAD, and an independent researcher. It is published in Small Group Research.

“Past studies of workplace conflict have tended to take two approaches—focusing on what a conflict is about and how conflicts are managed,” explains Laurie R. Weingart, Richard M. and Margaret S. Cyert Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business, who coauthored the study, “In our research, we took a different approach, focusing on how conflict is expressed.”

Groups have tendencies regarding how they express conflict that combine to form four approaches to conflict expression that can be measured. In this article, building on conflict expression theory, researchers developed the Conflict Expression Tendencies (CET) measure. The scale features four dimensions—arguing, debating, subverting, and disguising—each capturing a unique combination of directness and intensity of expressed opposition within a group.

The CET measure integrates research on a wide range of forms of oppositional communication in the workplace that have only been examined independently and separately, according to the authors. By integrating subtle forms of opposition, such as social undermining and passive aggression, with more commonly studied workplace conflict constructs like arguing and debating, the measure captures the full array of conflict expression tendencies within a social group while examining the unique variance explained by each.

In six studies with diverse participants in the lab and the field, the CET measure predicted individuals’ cognitive, affective, and psychological outcomes. Generally speaking, debating as a way to express conflict with high directness and low intensity boosted workers’ information acquisition, affect, and trust, while subverting, disguising, and arguing had negative effects.

The study also found that the same conflict interaction may be experienced differently by members of the same group based on how individuals perceive conflicts. The measure is designed to be used in a way that allows researchers to capture the CETs of a work unit through the eyes of its members with the goal of more effective team management.

“Overall, the CET scale provides a nuanced approach to diagnosing and managing workgroup conflict, recognizing the diversity in how individuals experience and interpret opposition,” says Yeonjeong Kim, Visiting Assistant Professor of Management at IU’s Kelley School of Business, lead author of the study and former Tepper PhD student. “It can be used to help leaders cultivate a more adaptive, responsive approach to conflict management, promoting constructive communication and healthier team dynamics.”

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Summarized from Kim, Y., Weingart, L. R., Bendersky, C., Behfar, K., Todorova, G., Bear, J., Jehn, K., & Miron-Spektor, E. Conflict Expression Tendencies in Workgroups: Measure Validation and a Test of Theory. Small Group Research. https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964261448469