Why Irritable Conflict Seekers Are Actually Beneficial For the Business
Friction as a key ingredient for progress
“Du choc des idées jaillit la lumière”¹ wrote the 17th-century French poet and critic Nicolas Boileau. What he meant was that enlightenment comes when ideas collide. Confronting different points of view can lead to the emergence of an innovative or enriched vision.
The collision of ideas, opinions, beliefs, assumptions, practices -the ingredients that make up organizational culture- is a conflict. According to Carl Jung, “a conflict requires a real solution and necessitates a third thing in which the opposites can unite. Here the logic of the intellect usually fails, for in a logical antithesis, there is no third.”²
Robbins and Judge define conflict as “a process that begins when one party perceives that another party has negatively affected, or is about to affect negatively, something that the first party cares about.”³ Conflicts occur within ourselves (intrapersonal conflict), between two people, in and between groups of people, and, at a macro level, between societies. Conflict sociologists think that societal structures determine human culture and human behavior.
How people feel, think, and behave relates to the way society is structured. Who finds me bread and cheese, it’s to his tune I dance is the English translation of a Dutch proverb that illustrates materialism. Materialism is the vision that ideas and beliefs are only the products of the material conditions in people’s lives. It contrasts with idealism, the concept that people’s thoughts and opinions primarily define social phenomena and social change. On a smaller scale, these sociological visions apply to organizations.
Conflict is omnipresent in work and life: our interests are frequently at odds with others’ interests. Simultaneously, people tend to avoid conflict because most of us want others to perceive us as likable or pleasant. At work, the fear that conflict harms our relationships with our colleagues results in conflict avoidance. Also, the pressure to respect authority and the organizational stress on teamwork only reinforce conflict avoidance.
“Unfortunately, this avoidance creates disconnects between business units, unnecessary revisions in project plans, and lower standards of performance -all of which complicate organizational life.”⁴ Conflict avoidance seems to do more harm than good. And given the promise that conflict resolution holds -innovative or enriched views and practices- it is wise not to consider conflict as a threat but rather as “opportunities and guides to transformation.”⁵ Unearthing conflicts and managing them build an adaptive culture in which all openly discuss difficult issues.
Creating a holding environment in which people can express unspoken concerns, anxieties, and issues without fear of being reprimanded or ridiculed seeks to identify what ties people together and enables them to maintain a collective focus on shared objectives.⁶ Orchestrating conflict is a discipline that designs and leads the process of getting conflicting parties to resolve the dispute themselves productively. When conflicting parties do not impose but co-create a resolution to the conflict, it is more easily adopted.
The right dose of well-managed friction leads to much-needed progress!
References
¹ English translation: “Enlightenment comes when ideas clash and collide!”
² Carl Jung, “The Conjunction,” Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 705
³ Stephen P. Robbins and Timothy A. Judge, Organizational Behavior, 17th Edition, Global Edition (Pearson Education 2017), p. 497
⁴ Ron Ashkenas, Is Your Culture Too Nice? (HBR, August 24, 2010)
⁵ Kenneth Cloke, Mediating Dangerously: The Frontiers of Conflict Resolution (Wiley, San Francisco, 2001) p. 6
⁵ Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marin Linsky, Orchestrate Conflict: Leading Adaptive Change by Surfacing and Managing Conflict, (Harvard Business Press, 2009)
