Dealing with conflict has been recognized as of particular importance in leadership. In organizational life, the typical manager may spend 25% of his time dealing with conflicts (Thomas & Schmidt, 1976). A common conflict occurs between the manager’s boss, whose paramount concern is for productivity, and the manager’s subordinates, whose paramount concern is for consideration.
The leader’s personality affects his or her rational and emotional feelings about conflict and what to do about it. One president, Lyndon Johnson, wanted every American to love him; another president, Harry Truman, concluded that, “If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.” National leaders must settle for less than universal affection. They must be willing to be unloved and they must deal with conflict (J. M. Burns, 1978). And so must most other leaders, for conflict often attends the leadership role. No leaders can be successful if they are not prepared to be rejected (T. O. Jacobs, 1970). Nonetheless, Levinson (1984, p. 133) pointed out that executives go to great lengths to avoid conflict because of their discomfort with feelings of anger. He observed that “much of the irrational in management practices arises because of people’s efforts to cope with their own anger and to avoid the anger of others. … But the very fact that they have angry feelings, when they often feel it is wrong to be angry, leaves them feeling guilty.” To contend with these feelings of anger and guilt, they make irrational decisions to deny their anger and to appease their conscience. Or they may avoid making or announcing the decision to avoid the conflict implied. Many leaders are like President Nixon, who had to rely on subordinates to relay the bad news to someone whom he wanted to fire or whose actions had been displeasing to him.
Appointed leaders with appropriate competencies and styles may still find their attempts to lead stymied because of numerous possible conflicts with their subordinates. The appointed leader may be resented as a representative of higher authority (Seaman, 1981), or subordinates may favor the appointment of someone else. The leader and the subordinates may have different opinions about the means and ends of their efforts, as well as other ideas. For example, college presidents and vice presidents may disagree about their institutions’ goals, although they generally are more likely to agree about means (Birnbaum, 1987a). A superior’s and a subordinate’s differences of opinion about the difficulty of achieving competence in the superior’s job may be another source of conflict. In an eight-country sample of 1,600 managers, the average time that senior executives thought it would take their subordinates to learn the senior executive’s job was 18 months; their subordinates estimated it would take them less than six months (Heller & Wilpert, 1981).
A conflict is mainly cognitive in nature when, say, executives disagree about the legality of an action and then call on the legal department to inform them about the law or regulation involved. A conflict is mainly emotional if, say, executives disagree on whether or not they have been disparaged and ignored by the CEO and should or should not tell him so. According to an analysis of conflict among 72 supervisor-subordinate dyads, cognitive and emotional conflict form a two-factor structure. One factor is purely emotional; the second factor is a combination of emotional and task conflict (Xin & Pelled, 2003). Generally, if a conflict is mainly cognitive, the outcome could lead to better understanding, affective acceptance, and a higher-quality decision, but more often does not. Making conflict constructive will be discussed later in the chapter. If a conflict is mainly emotional, the outcome will be less well understood and will result in a less emotionally acceptable decision. The resulting decision will be poorer (Amason, 1996). Xin and Pelled’s (2003) data revealed that both emotional, and a mix of emotional and task conflicts, were negatively related to supervisory leadership behavior—more strongly in the case of emotional conflict. In agreement, Carsten and Weingart (2002) conducted a meta-analysis, which showed that in studies of task conflicts the average correlation was —.27 with individual satisfaction (12 studies) and —.26 with team performance (25 studies). The corresponding correlations in studies of socioemotional conflicts were –.48 (14 studies) and –.22 (24 studies). From 1,048 to 1,808 individuals were involved.
Sources of role conflict for leaders include the ambiguity of a role, personal inadequacy to meet the demands of a role, incompatibility among several roles, conflicting demands, mixed costs and benefits associated with playing a role, and discrepancies between actual and self-accorded status. Role ambiguity occurs when leaders’ roles are not clearly defined and the leaders cannot determine what they are expected to do (Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, et al., 1964). Also, leaders may not be able to meet the demands of a task or the interpersonal demands of their role (D. J. Levinson, 1959). An incongruence occurs when, for instance, old, experienced workers are assigned to young, inexperienced supervisors. The workers are likely to perceive a discrepancy between their seniority and their rank in the status hierarchy (S. Adams, 1953). Interrole incompatibility occurs when an individual plays two or more roles in a group and the demands of these roles may be incompatible. For example, the role of group representative may be incompatible with the role of enforcer of discipline (Stouffer, 1949). Or there may be within-role conflict. That is, when different followers make conflicting demands on a given leadership role, the occupant of the role will find it difficult to take any course of action that will satisfy the various sets of expectations (Merton, 1940).
Conflict can occur if one would lose power, esteem, autonomy, or self-determination by joining or forming another group. For example, group members may reject an opportunity to join suggested coalitions with others in three-way bargaining situations even if that would be otherwise rewarding, because joining would cause loss of esteem in relation to the other members (Hoffman, Festinger, & Lawrence, 1954). Holt (1952a, 1952b) inferred from analyses of French cabinets and college interfraternity councils that otherwise mutually rewarding coalitions were rejected because a loss of autonomy or self-determination was involved.
Conflicts and disagreements may arise in the legitimatization process—in the right to function as a leader. Thus, when kingdoms were reconstituted in the nineteenth century in such countries as Belgium, Bulgaria, Greece, and Sweden, outsiders from Germany and France were legitimated as kings to avoid internal dissent. Selection of a presumably impartial outsider as constitutional monarch is consistent with the tendency for a leader of an organization to be acknowledged as the one organizational member with the legitimate power to play the role of final arbitrator, the superordinate whose judgment can settle disputes among political factions. This function was often believed to be critical for the avoidance of anarchy. The maintenance and security of the state depended on the existence of a legitimate position at the top whose occupant could arbitrate conflicts among all followers. Daum (1975) looked at the impact of internal promotion versus bringing in an outsider to lead the group. The results were as expected. The selection of a leader from within the group tended to cause the remaining members to express lower overall satisfaction and to reduce their voluntary participation following the change.
If members can agree on the leadership structure, they are more likely to be satisfied with the group, according to results obtained by Shelley (1960b). Similarly, Bass and Flint (1958a) found that early agreement about who shall lead increases a group’s effectiveness. Heslin and Dunphy (1964) noted that the satisfaction of members was high when the degree of consensus about one another’s status was also high.
Role Ambiguity. One’s location in an organizational hierarchy will make a difference in how much role ambiguity one experiences. Culbert and McDonough (1985) suggested that much of the conflict observed in organizations starts at the top with excessive competition among senior executives with special interests vying for power. Without their awareness, a domino effect is created; the competitive conflicts at the top set off conflicts at each echelon below. Culbert and McDonough (1985) attributed much of the conflict in industry to the failure of those who are in conflict to recognize that they actually have compatible interests. Sometimes they did not acknowledge one individual’s contributions to another or to the organization, and sometimes they did not achieve “a common frame of reference so that each could see that the other’s efforts made organizational sense.”
More role ambiguity occurs among lower-level managers. The responsibilities and authority of first-line supervisors and middle managers are less clearly defined than those of top management. Uncertain about what they are allowed and expected to do, they experience more tension than the top managers and feel less satisfied with their jobs. Thus D. C. Miller and Schull (1962) reported that middle managers registered more role stress than top managers and more frequently stated that they were unclear about the scope of their responsibilities and what their colleagues expected of them. Likewise, Brinker (1955) reported that first-line supervisors in industry worked under constant frustration because they were not given enough authority to believe they were part of management or to solve the problems presented by their subordinates. Supervisors of 140 management clubs wanted to be more closely identified with higher management because most of them felt that they did not know the company policy on many important matters and, as a result, they had to work in the dark (Mullen, 1954). Moore and Smith (1953) found that in the military, non-commissioned officers rather than higher-ups felt constant pressure because of their inadequate authority, a lack of distinction between supervisors and technicians, and conflicts among the leadership philosophies of different levels of organization. Consistent with all these findings, Wispe and Thayer (1957) found less consensus about the functions of the assistant manager than about those of the manager. The assistant manager’s role was ambiguous in that neither the manager nor the assistant manager knew whether certain functions were obligatory or optional. Strain and tension were higher for the assistant manager in the more ambiguous role.
Different Assignments. Conflict arises between managers and professionals; between people in boundary-spanning activities that link activities outside and inside an organization, such as marketing, and people in internal operations such as manufacturing. Interviews have established that boundary spanners had interpersonal and cooperative orientations, whereas line managers emphasized authority, power, and rationality (Anonymous, undated). Conflict arises between staff and line workers and between individuals, in general, who work in different parts of the same organization. For example, there is continual tension between university administrators and faculty members and between hospital administrators and community physicians. Much of this tension is due to their differences in perception (Browne & Golembiewski, 1974), attribution (Sonnenfeld, 1981), and cognitive orientation (Kochan, Cummings, & Huber, 1976). Nystrom (1986) found systematic significant differences in the work-related beliefs of middle managers who were responsible for the supervision of line personnel and those in the same manufacturing organization who were responsible for designing the work processes and specifying outputs and controls. Middle-line managers believed more strongly in the desirability of structuring people’s work activities than the technical design managers, who had a stronger belief in internal rather than external loci of control. The middle managers also were more motivated to manage than the technical design managers.
Different Perspectives. A mail survey of 155 organizations indicated that divided or unclear support by senior management for employees’ involvement resulted in resistance by middle management to such involvement. The expected benefits to the firms of employees’ involvement failed to appear when management was in conflict about the practice (Fenton-O’Creevey, 1998). Those at the bottom and top of their union hierarchy may have unflattering opinions about each other. S. M. Peck (1966) found that union stewards saw corruption in their top union officials but justified the unethical activities of the top officials on the grounds that strong methods were required to cope with existing conditions and that corruption was endemic. Miles and Ritchie (1968) reported that high-ranking union officials “agreed” that shop stewards and rank-and-file members should be encouraged to participate more in decision making and that such participation would result in improved morale, better decisions, and willingness to accept the goals of bargaining. Nonetheless, they were uncertain whether stewards and rank-and-file members would set reasonable goals for themselves if given the opportunity.
Another source of continuing conflict is the limited control that managers have over the resources they need to get their work done (Pfeffer, 1981a). In a study of laboratory directors at hospitals, Jongbloed and Frost (1985) found that the laboratory directors were constrained by numerous individuals and groups outside the laboratories, including the physicians who were responsible for ordering the laboratory’s tests; by the hospital’s higher administration; and by the head of the department of pathology, as well as accreditation councils, labor unions, and professional societies. One laboratory director coped satisfactorily with this conflict; another did not. The successful laboratory director devoted a lot of energy to lobbying for increased resources and gained more needed funding. The unsuccessful director concentrated on the technical aspects of the laboratory operations and was forced to continue with a less adequate budget.
Pfeffer and Salancik (1978) examined the amount of discretion mayors had in determining items for their cities’ budgets. They found that mayors who dealt with powerful organized interest groups, such as businesses, professional societies, and labor unions, had less discretion over the budgets than mayors whose cities had a higher proportion of nonwhites, governmental employees, and construction workers, and a lower median income.
Conflicts between work and family—particularly conflicts over child care and home care—have become major issues since the movement of large numbers of women into the workforce (Lerner, 1994). Imbalance between work and life has become a major source of stress at the workplace and in the family (Kozek 1998). Fisher-McAuley, Stanton, Jolton, et al. (2003) calculated the path analysis for 603 physical fitness professionals (89% female, mean age close to 41). Their opportunity to balance their work and life revealed a path coefficient of .50 with their job satisfaction, which in turn correlated –.61 with their intention to quit.
To some extent, role conflict and its effects are in the eye of the beholder. Maier and Hoffman’s (1965) study of role-playing groups found that some discussion leaders perceived interpersonal conflict as a source of lower-quality decisions. Other leaders saw disagreement as a source of innovation and new ideas. But more often, role ambiguity and role conflict tend to be deleterious to leaders’ performance and satisfaction. Uncertainty about whether one’s performance is adequate is a symptom of role ambiguity and a source of ineffectiveness, according to Pepinsky, Pepinsky, Minor, et al. (1959), who studied experimental groups working on a construction problem. The leaders of half the groups were required to work with a superior officer whose approval or disapproval of transactions could be predicted. The leaders of the other groups were required to deal with a superior whose behavior could not be predicted. The researchers found that the productivity of the team was higher under conditions of high predictability than under conditions of low predictability.
Rizzo, House, and Lirtzman (1970) found that with more perceived role ambiguity and conflict, less overall leadership behavior and less job satisfaction were reported in two industrial firms. Tosi (1971) also obtained results indicating that role conflict was negatively related to job satisfaction but not necessarily to the effectiveness of the group. Supervisors seemed able to tolerate role conflict better if they did not have to interact much with their own immediate bosses. In a study of seven companies, supplemented by a national survey, R. L. Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, et al. (1964) found that role conflict increased as the ambiguity of the situation increased and the rate of communication with one’s superiors was high. Job satisfaction decreased under these same conditions. They inferred that the source of most role conflicts is in interactions with one’s immediate superiors. Subsequent studies corroborated this, reporting that as much as 88% of all role conflict was with one’s boss.
In all, anyone in an organizational hierarchy needs to act both cooperatively and competitively. Roberts (1986) surveyed 350 managers from three levels of management in two business firms and two universities. In all four organizations, managers reported using both cooperative and competitive styles in their relations with their bosses, peers, and subordinates. This is likely to be one reason why successful performance in an initially leaderless group discussion is a valid predictor of success in management positions (Bass, 1954a): both situations call for cooperating and competing with others.
Conflicts within and between individuals arise when there are incongruities or mismatches among their levels of status and esteem, their rules, roles, influence, competence, personality, and expectations.
Status-Status Incongruence. Ordinarily, people have multiple roles and positions and are accorded status for each. Each status may be matched in value with the other statuses, or it may be incongruent. In organizations that are a mix of bureaucracies and collegial entities, conflict arises because the same individuals must play roles with various degrees of status and importance, depending on the decisions involved. For example, in a university hospital, the university president, the vice president for health sciences, and the medical school faculty will have more influence than the hospital’s governing board over the selection of the dean of medicine, the hospital director, and the chief of the medical staff; but the reverse will be true of issues related to the financial integrity of the hospital. Among 26 such decision-making issues, Wilson and McLaughlin (1984) found that with regard to influence there was little correlation between the medical school department head, the dean, and the hospital director. The influence of the incumbent of a particular position in the hospital depended mainly on the issue.
Conflict results if there is an incongruity between one’s status in one situation and in another. For example, military enlisted personnel who had high-status civilian positions were more dissatisfied with their officers than were enlisted personnel who came from civilian jobs of lower status. Former engineers were more critical of their officers than former truck drivers were (Stouffer, Suchman, De Vinney, et al., 1949). Conflict is less and performance more effective when there is congruence between two sources of a leader’s status. Knapp and Knapp (1966) studied elected officers and nonofficers who served as group leaders in a verbal conditioning experiment. Groups led by officers exhibited a higher rate of response and conditioned more readily than groups led by non-officers. The official status of the leaders facilitated the groups’ learning.
Search for Congruence. People tend to try to increase status-status congruence. In class-conscious Britain, 156 first-line supervisors varied in the social class to which they felt they belonged. Those who perceived themselves as higher in social class more readily identified with their senior managers. And the more they thought that their role as supervisor was lower in status than the status of their social class, the more they identified with the senior managers (Child, Pearce, & King, 1980). Jaques (1952) observed much anxiety and confusion when a British worker (low status) was assigned to chair (high status) a conference with management. Relief and satisfaction came only after the managing director took the chair. Trow and Herschdorfer (1965) found that groups with incongruent status structures that were free to change did so, whereas those with equal freedom but with congruent structures did not change. Furthermore, groups with high degrees of status incongruency were rated low in the performance of tasks and in the satisfaction of their members. Similarly, in a study of 50 workers in one department of a firm, Zaleznik, Christensen, and Roethlisberger (1958) found that members with high status congruence were most likely to meet the productivity standards of management. Likewise, S. Adams (1953) demonstrated that group members were better satisfied when leadership and other high-level positions were occupied by persons who ranked high in age, education, experience, and prestige. The group’s productivity tended to suffer when the high-status positions were occupied by persons who ranked low in other aspects of status (age, education, experience, and social position). Yet Singer (1966) found that although status incongruence in groups was associated with tension, disorganization, and hostile communications, it did not result in lower productivity by the group or in the dissatisfaction of the group members.
Two Leaders. Two consuls were appointed each year to lead the Roman republic to avoid the possibility of dictatorship by one. Groups with two appointed, elected, or emergent leaders are inherently likely to generate conflict. Osborn, Hunt, and Skaret (1977) looked at potential conflicts between two leaders whose duties overlapped—the fraternity chapter adviser and the elected president—in each of 33 local chapters of a national business fraternity. The authors concluded that organizational effectiveness would be enhanced if only one leader played an active role in influencing subordinates and exchanges with other units. Similar conclusions about the inherent conflict in the overlapping roles of two leaders were reached by Whyte (1943), who examined two-leader configurations in mental institutions.1 When coleaders are appointed as joint heads of social work training groups, conflicts between the leaders will block the groups’ development. But if the two leaders can work together and resolve their potential disagreements, advantages will accrue in the greater opportunities to vary their roles, the wider perspectives for solving problems, and better management of and support and reinforcement for the group (Galinsky & Schopler, 1980). Such duality is built into German firms, which are led by a technical director and a commercial director and—unlike U.S. firms—have no single president. Again, although conflicting loyalties may be created, the benefits of this organizational design include equal attention to the quality of the products and to commercial success. Co-directors and co-presidents of organizations can conflict, and this will block an organization from successfully functioning.
Formal-Informal Incongruence. Mismatched formal and informal structures in any organization may be a threat to the organization (Selznick, 1948). Moreno (1934/1953) noted that the formal groupings which a higher authority superimposes on informal, spontaneous groupings are a chronic source of conflict. Roethlisberger and Dickson (1947) associated workers’ dissatisfaction with discrepancies between the formal and informal organizations in an industrial plant.
Cause and effect may be reversed. Inadequacy of and dissatisfaction with the formal organization may give rise to an unrelated informal organization that is at variance with the formal one. The informal organization emerges as a means to resist the coercive demands of high-status members of the formal organization (Shartle, 1949b). Such an informal organization may arise if the formal organization cannot provide the members with rewards like recognition or opportunity (Pfiffner, 1951), and may bypass incompetent, high-status members in order to achieve the goals of the formal organization (Lichtenberg & Deutsch, 1954). When the formal and informal structures are remerged, however, conflict is lower and the group’s performance is better. Stouffer, Suchman, DeVinney, et al. (1949) observed that discussions were more satisfying to the participants when the informal leaders were given higher status by being placed in the position of discussion leaders. Haythorn (1954a) reported that the performance and cohesiveness of bomber crews were highly related to the extent to which the aircraft commander (the formal leader) performed the informal leadership roles usually expected of the formal group leader.
Role-Role Incongruence. Playing a variety of roles is not necessarily stressful. The average individual learns to play the role of child, sibling, parent, subordinate, peer, and superior without apparent effort. However, some individuals play only dependent roles well, and others are content only when they play the role of superior. Professionals tend to assume the role of authoritative, independent agents. Professional actors seem to enjoy enacting a great variety of roles but can experience personal conflict in separating their real selves from the parts they play: that is, in separating their private life from their public image. Although we may not be accomplished actors, we can play a variety of roles without apparent stress if the different roles are compatible. Nevertheless, we may find different roles incompatible with each other and, therefore, a source of conflict for us. Thus Getzels (1963) found that schoolteachers were expected to maintain a socioeconomic role that was higher than their salaries could sustain. On the one hand, in their role as citizens, they were often expected to be more active in church affairs and less active in political affairs than the average citizen; on the other hand, in their professional roles, they were expected to be certified as experts in various fields of knowledge, but they could be challenged by any parent or taxpayer. Thus teachers were subject to several sources of conflict in each of several incompatible roles. Getzels and Guba (1954) also studied individuals with two or more roles that were subject to contradictory or mutually exclusive expectations. They found that such role conflict tended to increase when one of the individual’s roles was perceived as illegitimate. Moonlighting workers would be an example if their daytime bosses frowned on their workers taking a second job or if taking a second job was illegal.
Status-Authority Incongruence. Evan and Simmons (1969) studied students who were hired to work as proofreaders. In the first experiment, their pay (supposedly an indicator of the worth and importance of their position) was inconsistent with their acknowledged level of competence. In the second experiment, their pay was inconsistent with their level of authority. Incongruity, particularly the underpayment of students in relation to their authority, resulted in a reduction in the quality of work and in conformity to the organization’s rules.
Status-Esteem Incongruence. Conflict ensues and a group’s performance is adversely affected when the group members who are in positions of importance (high status) are not esteemed (Bass, 1960). J. G. Jenkins’s (1948) study of two naval air squadrons—one with high morale and one with low morale—found that in the high-morale group, the squadron commander and executive officer were most often nominated as individuals with whom others would want to fly (that is, they were esteemed as well as high in status); but in the low-morale squadron, the commander or executive officer was not the most esteemed member. Palmer and Myers (1955) found a correlation of .38 between the effectiveness with which 40 antiaircraft radar crews maintained their equipment and the extent to which they esteemed their key noncommissioned officers. Similarly, Bass, Flint, and Pryer (1957b) obtained a correlation of .25 between the extent to which status was correlated with esteem in an experimental group and the subsequent effectiveness of the group. Gottheil and Vielhaber (1966) also observed that groups performed more effectively when their leaders were esteemed. Using interview studies, Shils and Janowitz (1948) concluded that German enlisted soldiers’ high morale and motivation to resist surrender during World War II seemed primarily due to their esteem for their officers. It continues to be true that German workers esteem their supervisors (Fukuyama, 1997). Among those Israeli soldiers in Lebanon in 1982 who believed the incursion to be immoral, morale remained high only if they highly esteemed their officers (Gal, 1987).
Firestone, Lichtman, and Colamosca (1975) had college students elect their own group leader after participating in an initially leaderless group discussion. The groups that were subsequently most effective in an emergency were those led by the elected member with the highest ratings for performance in the leaderless group discussion. Those that were worst in the emergency were led by the person they believed had the lowest ratings for performance in the preceding leaderless group discussion.
Status-Influence Incongruence. Ordinarily, those who are higher in status more frequently emerge and succeed as leaders. It becomes a source of conflict if a person of low status attempts to lead. Watson (1982) coded the taped interactions of 16 leader-subordinate dyads in a goal-setting discussion to discern their specific effects on each other. The dyads were made up of an elected leader of a student team and one randomly chosen subordinate team member. When the elected leaders attempted to dominate by abruptly changing the topic, by challenging a previous comment, or by making an ideational or personal challenge, the subordinates were most likely to respond with deference and a willingness to relinquish some but not all behavioral options. When the subordinates tried to dominate, however, the leaders resisted and competed for control of the situation. Thus when persons of higher status, the elected leaders, acted in congruence with their status, the subordinates complemented and completed the interaction with deference and simple agreement; but when the subordinates with lower status tried to dominate, the leaders resisted.
Inversions can occur in which those who are lower in status are able to be more influential than those who are higher in status. Such inversions can be a source of continuing resentment and hidden conflict when the high-status figures grudgingly acquiesce to those who are lower in status. Obviously, subordinates can be more influential over leaders who abdicate their role. Pettigrew (1973) gave examples of situations in which subordinates or those who are otherwise lower in status have influence over those who are higher in status. Generally, in these situations, higher-status superiors became dependent on their subordinates (Mechanic, 1962). Physicians can become so dependent on attendants in hospital wards that the attendants can block reforms. Prison guards can become dependent on the inmates for the inmates’ good behavior. Although guards can report prisoners for disobedience, too many such reports from the same guards create the impression among their superiors that they are ineffective. As a consequence, guards agree to let certain violations by prisoners go unreported in exchange for the prisoners’ cooperation in other matters. Experts can keep their superiors dependent on them for information, particularly about risky innovations, and thereby maintain power over their superiors (Crozier, 1984). Subordinates in the Soviet Union held their superiors hostage with their knowledge of illegal acts the superiors committed in order for the group to meet its production quotas (Granick, 1962).
Status-Competence Incongruence. If those with high status are incompetent for their role assignments, the group will be less productive, less successful, and less satisfied; and more conflict will be generated within the group. But strong positive associations between competence and effective leadership have been found in surveys and experiments. Woods (1913) related the judged ability (strong, mediocre, or weak) of 386 European sovereigns to their states’ performance from the eleventh century to 1789. A correlation of .60 was found between judged ability of a sovereign and ratings of the political, material, and economic progress of the state the sovereign headed. Similarly, Rohde (1954c) reported correlations up to .63 between the success of groups learning to go through a maze and the adequacy of the pretest performance of the person in charge of each of the groups. Furthermore, in a comparison of nine orientation discussion groups, Stouffer, Suchman, DeVinney, et al. (1949) observed that members were much more likely to say they “got a lot out of the discussion” when the member of the group who was chosen to lead the discussion was better educated. Bass (1961c) found that successful leadership was more highly related to ability in effective groups than in ineffective groups.
The choice of a competent leader is a major determinant of the effectiveness of a team and stimulates effective mutual influence among team members (Borg, 1956). Thus after analyzing a large number of small-group studies, Heslin and Dunphy (1964) concluded that group members are most likely to achieve consensus on the status structure of the group when: (1) the leader is perceived to be highly competent; (2) a leader emerges who is high in both group-task and group-maintenance functions; or (3) two mutually supportive leaders emerge, one specializing in task functions and the other in group-maintenance functions. (But two leaders of a single group may present problems, as was noted earlier.)
The mismatching of status and competence in a group is likely to result in the downgrading of the group leader. Thus Ghiselli and Lodahl (1958a) found that a supervisor was likely to be poorly regarded by higher management if he led a group containing a worker whose supervisory ability was superior to his. Goldman and Fraas (1965) noted the importance of matching competence and status in their comparison of groups whose leaders were elected, appointed for competence, or appointed randomly. They found that groups with leaders who were appointed for competence did best; groups with elected leaders did next best; and groups without leaders or whose leaders had been appointed randomly did the worst.
Effects of Loyalty. Ordinarily, we would expect that competent groups would produce higher-quality decisions. But Dooley and Fryxell (1999), in a study of 86 strategic decision teams in hospitals, found that the quality of these teams’ decisions was higher—according to independent judges—only when the members were seen as more loyal (they did not try to take advantage of each other) and expressed many differing opinions. The quality of decisions suffered when the team members expressed many different opinions but were low in loyalty (tried to mislead each other). For high-quality decisions and commitment, both competence and willingness to disagree were necessary.
Incongruence of Competence and Power. Exline and Ziller (1959) assembled groups in which members held positions that were incongruent in competence and power, and other groups in which competence and power were congruent. The participants rated the congruent groups as significantly more congenial, as exhibiting stronger agreement between members, and as involving less overlap of activities.
Incongruence of Personality Traits and Roles. As might be expected, effectiveness is reduced by incongruities between the organization or group members’ personality traits and the roles required of them. Smelser (1961) selected students who scored either high or low on a personality test of dominance. The least productive dyads were composed of pairs in which the partner assessed as submissive was assigned to a role that required dominance and the partner assessed as dominant was given a role that required submissiveness. The most productive dyads were those in which role assignments were consistent with personality assessments.
Requisite personality may be a matter of expectations. Violated expectations generate conflict. Lipham (1960) tested the hypothesis that personality traits compatible with expectations about a leadership role will be related to the leader’s effectiveness. In a study of school principals, Lipham found that those who scored high on expected characteristics, such as drive, emotional control, and sociability, were rated more effective than those who scored high on unexpected characteristics such as submissiveness and abasement. In a study of insurance agencies, Wispe (1955, 1957) found that successful agents were characterized by a strong drive for success. But the same attitude toward success, when exhibited by the agency manager, was at variance with the agents’ expectation of a more humane, considerate orientation toward their problems. Thus the characteristic that was perceived to contribute to successful selling was not necessarily expected to contribute to effective supervision.
Overt conflict was avoided (at a price) when those of lower status hid their abilities from those of higher status. Before the social revolution of the 1960s, college women often used to “play dumb” on dates, just as black subordinates did in dealing with white superiors. Ordinarily, a better way for an organization to avoid conflict and to enhance satisfaction and performance is to develop suitable promotional policies that match the competence of employees with their status (Bass, 1960).
The failure of individuals to align their own needs for personal meaning, identity, and success with what they believe the organization needs to receive from those in their roles is at the heart of individual members’ conflicts within an organization (Culbert & McDonough, 1980). Organizational and personal needs must be fused to allow both the individual and the organization to reach high levels of achievement and satisfaction (Lester, 1981).
Within-Role Expectations. The negative effect of within-role expectations in groups, organizations, and society is largely attributable to discrepancies between what the members expect they should do and what others expect them to do. They experience conflicts when others make contradictory demands on their roles in the group, organization, or society that cannot be satisfied by any compatible course of action (Brandon, 1965). The man or woman in the middle is a well-known example.
The Man or Woman in the Middle. This is a common dilemma. Like everyone else at each successive level in an organizational hierarchy, the supervisor is a man or woman in the middle. Such persons face conflicting role demands from at least two sources: their superiors and their subordinates. Although the person in the middle is likely to be subjected to competing demands from numerous other sources—peers, higher authority, rules, suppliers, and customers—most attention has been paid to the conflicting demands on supervisors from superiors and subordinates (Gardner & Whyte, 1945; Smith, 1948). Superiors expect results, initiative, planning, firmness, and structure. Subordinates expect recognition, opportunity, consideration, approachability, encouragement, and representation (Brooks, 1955). Thus Pfeffer and Salancik (1975) demonstrated that superiors expected more task behavior from first-line supervisors whereas subordinates expected more socializing from them. Likewise, Snoek (1966) found that supervisors “in the middle” experienced more conflict than operatives “at the bottom.” Supervisors had a wider diversity of interactions than the operating personnel, and the conflicting demands placed on them led them to experience more role strain.
In military organizations, officers above and enlisted personnel below disagree on what characterizes the good noncommissioned officer in between them (U.S. Air Force, 1952). Factor-analytic studies by J. V. Moore (1953) showed, for example, that subordinates wanted noncoms to be less strict whereas superiors emphasized noncoms’ military bearing and ability. Halpin (1957b) found that commanders of aircrews who highly emphasized consideration were most highly rated by their subordinates, whereas those who most often initiated structure were more likely to be rated effective leaders by their superiors. Similarly, Zenter (1951) noted that 87% of the officers studied thought that a good noncommissioned officer follows orders while only 44% of the enlisted men accepted this idea. At the same time, 49% of enlisted men believed that a good noncommissioned officer has to gain popularity, but only 7% of officers agreed. One discordant note in these findings was that Graen, Dansereau, and Minami (1972b) failed to find the expected discrepancy between subordinates’ and superiors’ role expectations of executives in the middle.
Nonetheless, Lawler, Porter, and Tannenbaum (1968) found that interactions with superiors were more valued than those with subordinates. In addition, the managers reacted more favorably to interactions that their superiors initiated than to those initiated by others. Porter and Kaufman (1959) devised a scale for determining the extent to which supervisors described themselves as similar to top managers. Self-perceptions that were similar to those of top managers were associated with patterns of interaction that peers perceived to be similar to those of managers in high-level positions.
Subordinates whose attitudes and role perceptions were similar to those of their superiors were preferred by their superiors (Miles, 1964a) and rated by them as more effective (V. F. Mitchell, 1968). In turn, subordinates who resembled their superiors in the personality traits “sociable” and “stable” were better satisfied than those who resembled their superiors less closely. Henry (1949) and others found that rapidly promoted executives particularly tended to identify themselves with their superiors. On the other hand, Pelz (1952) found that first-line supervisors who were subordinate oriented tended to be evaluated positively by their workers, but only if they were perceived to have sufficient influence with superiors to satisfy the workers’ expectations.
Balma, Maloney, and Lawshe (1958a, 1958b) studied more than 1,000 foremen in 19 plants. They found that foremen who identified themselves with management were rated as having significantly more productive groups than those who did not identify with their superiors. However, the employees’ satisfaction with a foreman was not related to the foreman’s orientation. R. S. Barrett (1963) discovered that foremen who perceived that their approach to problems was similar to the approach of their immediate superiors tended to feel free to do things their own way. Fleishman and Peters (1962) observed that top-level managers tended to connect the effectiveness of lower-level managers with that of these managers’ immediate middle-level superiors.
Customers and Management. Employees who are in contact with customers face competing expectations from customers and management. Management expects these employees to follow the rules while providing high-quality service. The customers may have requests that require bending the rules. Customers may exacerbate the situation by rewarding the contact employees with tips. Such employees need to balance the competing expectations of customers and managers (Eddleston, Kidder, & Litzky, 2002).
Conflicts between Organizational Levels. Neuberger (1983) viewed the supervisor as the focus of multilateral expectations that could be ambiguous, conflicting, and contradictory. Rules, regulations, and structure do not necessarily provide solutions to such conflicts, which can result in political behavior and unstable leadership behavior. Conflict may arise because there are decided differences in what members at different levels of the organization expect is appropriate behavior for them. L. W. Porter (1959) reported that first-level supervisors viewed themselves as careful and controlled in their approach to the job and to other people. Their second-level managers, in contrast, described themselves as enterprising, original, and bold. First-level supervisors differed from line workers as much as they differed from higher-level managers; they perceived themselves to be significantly more careful and controlled than the workers saw themselves. The first-level supervisory role imposed demands for behavioral patterns that differed from those of superiors and subordinates. A form of conflict that has long been recognized (Coser, 1956) is superior-subordinate conflict involving viewpoints, opinions, and ideas about the task being performed and, on the other hand, tension, animosity, and annoyances—socioemotional, interpersonal incompatibilities (Jehn, 1995). D. E. Frost (1983) reported that for 121 first-level supervisors, perceived conflict in their own role correlated .27 with their boss’s emphasis on production and .35 with conflict with their boss. Consistent with the multiple-screen model of Fiedler, Potter, Zais, et al. (1979), experienced first-level supervisors’ performance was greater if conflict was high with their bosses and declined when conflict was low. The reverse was true of the relationship between the first-level supervisors’ intelligence and their performance.
The conflicts of middle management were reflected in an opinion research poll of 1982, which found that over half the respondents had “lost confidence in their superiors”; 69% saw too many decisions being made (and made poorly) at the top by persons who were unfamiliar with the particular problems (Fowler, 1982). Adding to the middle managers’ malaise was job insecurity, brought on by drastic reductions in middle-management positions in the 1980s (Clutterbuck, 1982a)—a development predicted 30 years earlier by Leavitt and Whisler (1958), who foresaw that dramatic improvements in information processing would substitute for this level of management. The trend continued into the early twenty-first century, when many plants and offices closed because of foreign competition and the movement of companies offshore.
Conflicts with the Boss. Kahn, Wolfe, Quinn, et al. (1964) found that 88% of all organizational role conflict involves pressure from above. D. E. Frost (1983) discovered that the boss’s behavior created most of the role conflict and ambiguity for first-and second-level leaders in an urban fire department. Managers were the overriding reason for the role ambiguity and conflict experienced by 123 salaried employees of a metal fabricating firm who were surveyed by Deluga (1986). Jambor (1954) found that when supervisors’ perception of their role differed from their superiors’ perception of it, the supervisors experienced more anxiety than when their role perception differed from their subordinates’ perception of it. Fiedler (1984) amassed considerable evidence to show that when experienced leaders are in conflict with their boss, they tend to be able to maintain productive groups. But intelligent leaders without such experience are handicapped by conflicts with their boss. Experience, not intelligence, helps leaders deal with the stress engendered by conflicts with their own superiors.
Conflicts with Subordinates. Using clinical observation and psychoanalytical theory, Zaleznik (1965a) conceived of four types of malfunctioning subordinates, each representing a type of personality that is in conflict with the demands of a higher authority:
(1) Impulsive subordinates rebel and strive to overthrow authority and its symbols; unconscious motives may be to displace parental authority or to deal with painful loneliness;
(2) Compulsive subordinates also want to dominate the struggle with authority, but they do so passively. Their behavior is rigid, and they avoid making decisions. Underneath, there are doubts, rapid shifts in feelings about interpersonal encounters, hidden aggression, and denial of responsibility, coupled with a power conscience and strong guilt feelings;
(3) Immature early development results in masochists, illustrated by accident-prone employees who evoke sympathy when hurt. Their performance is inadequate and invites criticism and shame. Their identity is with the oppressed, helpless, and weak;
(4) Withdrawn subordinates turn their interests inward and passively submit to a perceived malevolent world and untrustworthy superiors. Although they may handle routine tasks well, they make little effort to be innovative.
Zaleznik’s advice for supervising these four types of subordinates is to avoid being trapped into their dynamics—for example, by reinforcing the doubts of compulsive subordinates or losing control to the impulsive, rebellious subordinates. Conflict with such subordinates needs to be objectified, and conflicting issues need to be broken into their components. Realities need to be recognized.
Discordant Expectations. Discrepancies between people’s expectations about assignments, jobs, or positions and the expectations of their subordinates, peers, superiors, and clients about these assignments, jobs, or positions have been studied extensively as fundamental sources of conflict. Similarly, conflicts arise as a consequence of discrepancies between what is done by people and what ought to be done. Thus Colmen, Fiedler, and Boulger (1954) reported little agreement among 45 leaders in the U.S. Air Force in evaluating their own duties. Further confusion resulted from a discrepancy between what potential leaders thought they ought to do and what they actually did. Halpin (1957b) found little relationship between how aircraft commanders and school superintendents said they might behave and how their subordinates said they actually behaved.
Stogdill, Scott, and Jaynes (1956) asked officers at various levels of a large naval organization to describe what they did and what they ought to do. In addition, their direct reports described what the immediate superiors did and ought to do. The subordinates’ self-expectations were much more highly related to their expectations for their superiors than were their self-descriptions to their descriptions of their superiors. Subordinates entertained similar expectations for themselves and for their superiors, but their descriptions of their own and their superiors’ behavior were not as similar. Except for handling paperwork and other forms of individual effort, they did not perceive that their own behavior resembled that of their superiors. Discrepancies between superiors’ self-descriptions and self-expectations were highly related to their level of responsibility.2 Superiors who obtained high scores from their subordinates on level of responsibility perceived themselves as having too much responsibility and as acting as representatives of their followers more extensively than they should. They also reported spending too little time inspecting the organization and too much time on paperwork and engaging in all forms of leadership behavior. Discrepancies between subordinates’ self-descriptions and self-expectations were greater at higher organizational levels where their superiors were recipients of frequent interactions. Under these conditions, the subordinates perceived themselves to be doing more than they should in attending conferences, interviewing personnel, handling paperwork, and representing their own subordinates. When a superior delegated a great deal, the subordinates thought that they had been given too much responsibility, and spent less time than they should on coordination and professional activities.
Along similar lines, Triandis (1959a) found that the smaller the discrepancy between workers’ ideal supervisor behavior and actual descriptions of their supervisors’ behavior, the better the supervisor was liked by the workers. Results obtained by Holden (1954) indicated that the more a leader’s behavior conformed to the group members’ expectations, the more productive the group was. Havron and McGrath (1961) suggested that the leaders of highly effective groups either behave as expected or are successful in inducing group members to form ideals that are similar to the leaders’ actual behavior. Thus Foa (1956), who studied supervisors and workers in Israeli factories, found that these supervisors and workers agreed on the ideal behavior for a supervisor, but that they did not agree on what the supervisor actually did. The more agreement there was between the ideal and perceived behavior of the supervisor, the better satisfied the workers were with their supervisor. Workers who identified with their supervisor tended to attribute to the supervisor the ideals that they held. Ambivalent workers attempted to conform to the ideal attributed to their supervisor but were aware of the supervisor’s deviation from it. Indifferent workers felt less inclined to accept the ideal of the supervisor in their own behavior and were also less likely to notice discrepancies between the supervisor’s ideal and real behavior. However, F. J. Davis (1954) failed to corroborate these effects among U.S. Air Force officers: in his study the successful adjustment of the followers did not depend on their agreement with the leader about the leader’s role.
Other Sources of Within-Role Conflict. Differences in perceived needs, values, interests, and goals are structural sources of conflict among managers at different hierarchical levels as well as between leaders and followers in the community. For example, Fiedler, Fiedler, and Camp (1971) found that whereas community leaders thought poor government, neighborhood disunity, and the failure of public services were the concerns of consequence, householders believed that crime, immorality, traffic, and unemployment were the issues that needed attention. Managers and union leaders both generally overemphasize the importance of pay as a source of dissatisfaction of employees and underemphasize the importance of such concerns as security, job satisfaction, and opportunity (Bass & Ryterband, 1979).
Contradictory demands may stem from discrepancies between one’s immediate work group and one’s reference group. At some colleges, professors may be caught between the demands of their cosmopolitan, professional, research-oriented reference groups and the role demands of their local campus for high-quality teaching and good relations with students. Industrial scientists may be caught between their professional reference groups’ demand that they get their work published and their business firms’ demand for secrecy. These conflicts are a source of dissatisfaction, as was illustrated in an industrial study by Browne and Neitzel (1952), who found that workers’ satisfaction declined as the disagreement between what their leaders demanded of them and what was wanted by their reference groups increased. Jacobson (1951) and Jacobson, Charters, and Lieberman (1951) studied foremen, union stewards, and workers. The fore-men expected the stewards to play a passive role in the organization, whereas the stewards and the workers expected the stewards to play an active role on behalf of employees and the union. Foremen and stewards whose expectations deviated from the norm of their reference group got along more easily with each other.
Supervisors in training are often caught in a conflict when their managers are opposed to what the supervisors are being taught by their trainers. Furthermore, trainers are more likely to succeed in modifying the supervisors’ behavior if their bosses show interest in the training program, participate in its development, and take the training course first (W. Mahler, 1952). Politicians must continually cope with conflict between what they must do and what they would prefer to do. They must choose between what they find expedient and what they know is right. Personal integrity has to be sacrificed to unholy alliances. Henry IV of France, a Protestant Huguenot, converted to Catholicism because “Paris is well worth a mass.” For Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, making a deal with each other in 1939 bought them time. For President Dwight D. Eisenhower, keeping silent in the face of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s virulent attacks on George Marshall, Eisenhower’s close friend, was justified as a means of maintaining the Republican coalition. Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush both embraced the agenda of the far right while campaigning for election but tended to give a lower priority to many of the right wing’s demands once they were elected.
Punctuality. Some celebrities, such as Madonna and Elizabeth Taylor, have been noted for being chronically late for appointments. Politicians such as Bill Clinton and Jesse Jackson were likewise known for showing up late for meetings. According to Janine Braier, “Being late is a statement; if you are chronically late … it’s a way of saying ‘you need me but I don’t need you.’ … I never want to have the experience of needing someone. I always want them to want me.” People who are habitually late usually are overloaded with tasks and somehow schedule impossibilities into their workdays. They deny the reality that by being late they are delaying others. They feel omnipotent and in complete control. Being late may be a way of deliberately manipulating time to emphasize one’s own importance and others’ dependence (Jennings, 1999, p. 18).
Identification. Racial, ethnic, and national identification is well known as a source of conflict. Conflict may then be exacerbated by divergent beliefs based on historical memories, “we-they” polarization, religious intolerance, and economic, social, and political privileges (Rouhana & Bar-Tel, 1998). But Kelman (1999), in discussing the continuing Israeli-Palestinian confrontation and each side’s negative identification with the other, is realistic, also noting positive interdependence (Palestinians are a source of labor for Israel; Israelis are a source of jobs for Palestine). The leaders of both sides must work to change the beliefs of their own people that they are the victims and the other side are the aggressors.
Identification with superiors or subordinates appears to be a key to understanding the man or woman in the middle. Potential conflicts with supervisors and subordinates depend on with whom identification and similarity are sought. Thus Pfeffer and Salancik (1978) observed that when leaders were more responsive to their subordinates’ demands, the leaders’ characteristics and activities were more like those of their subordinates. The leaders were more responsive to their bosses’ pressure to produce when the leaders’ activities were more like those of their own superiors. A second study found that supervisors who were required to engage in a great deal of peer-oriented interdepartmental coordination were less likely to be responsive to their subordinates.
D. T. Campbell and his associates developed various methods of measuring identification with superiors and subordinates. Of the variety of independent sub-scales that emerged (Campbell, Burwen, & Chapman, 1955), the most promising were identification with discipline, superior-subordinate orientation, and eagerness for responsibility and advancement. Identification with superiors rather than subordinates correlated .21 with authoritarianism, .25 with identification with discipline, and –.20 with cooperation (Chapman & Campbell, 1957a). Paradoxically, those of higher rank appear to be less concerned about their superiors and more concerned about their subordinates. Campbell and McCormack (1957) found that colonels in the U.S. Air Force were significantly less oriented toward superiors than were Air Force majors or college men, and majors were less so than Air Force cadets or their instructors. Furthermore, Air Force majors and lieutenant colonels were significantly more subordinate-oriented than the other groups tested.
Generational Conflict. A generational conflict resulting in a lack of identification with senior leadership was suggested as a cause of an expected 13% attrition of U.S. Army captains in just one year, 2001. The captains were members of the cohort called Generation X, who were born between 1960 and 1980. Above them in rank from major to general was the baby-boomer generation, whose members were born between 1943 and 1960. The Generation Xers tended to have more divorced, two-career parents, more disruptive families, and less idyllic childhoods than the baby boomers, whose families were more stable, with parents in more traditional roles. Compared with Generation Xers, baby boomers value work and promotion as more important. Baby boomers are more likely to be workaholics. In contrast, Generation Xers value having more free time, more friendships, and a better family life (Wong, 2000).
Both the leader and the led determine whether conflicts can be readily reduced or resolved. Among the six factors that identified the effective manager, Morse and Wagner (1978) found one that involved the ability to deal with conflict among colleagues and associates and to avoid continuing conflicts that got in the way of completing assignments. Walton (1972) noted that effectiveness as a leader was associated with the ability to convert conflicts of interests among subordinates and colleagues into accommodation, conciliation, compromise, and, better yet, consensual agreement. Effective leaders did not run away from conflict or try to deal with it arbitrarily.
In contrast with transactional leaders, transformational leaders seem to have more ability to deal with conflict. They are less readily disturbed by it, possibly because they are “more at peace with themselves.” Gibbons (1986) reached this conclusion on the basis of in-depth interviews with 16 senior executives in a high-technology firm identified as transformational or transactional by peer nominations and by subordinates’ descriptions of them on the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (Bass & Avolio, 1989).
In organizational mergers, a source of considerable conflict, the acquired employees are more satisfied with the merger when their leaders are transformational (Covin, Kolenko, Sightler, et al., 1997). Followers also make a difference. Lien, Kottke, and Agars (2003) found that emotional conflicts among 84 employees of public organizations in southern California were lessened by collectivistic rather than individualistic attitudes and by tolerance for multicultural diversity.
Conflicts may be resolved or lessened if the leaders and the led have dual loyalties. They may be loyal both to the management and to the union in conflict. They may have interests in both the organization and its members. They may want to remain concerned about the feelings of both their superiors and associates who may be in conflict.
Conflicting interests may be overriden by multiple identifications and allegiances. Potential conflicts may be reduced, avoided, and even resolved because people who are members of two groups or organizations with conflicting interests may consider themselves loyal to both. For example, Stagner (1954) obtained a correlation of .33 between the favorableness of workers’ attitudes toward their company and toward the union. Purcell (1954) found that although more workers identified with the company than with the union, 73% of the men and women surveyed expressed loyalty to both. Supervisors and stewards each identified with the organization that they represented officially, but both supervisors (57%) and stewards (88%) generally felt favorable toward the others’ organization. In a case study of 18 supervisors at a British shoe factory, Armstrong (1983) was chagrined (because of his Marxist orientation) to find that despite the supervisors’ resentment about their deteriorating income and status relative to the workforce, they remained loyal to the senior management. For Armstrong, this continuing loyalty to senior management meant that the supervisors failed to recognize their interests as members of the working class who were exploited by the capitalist senior management.
Obrochta (1960) obtained results indicating that supervisors and workers were most similar regarding their attitudes toward the company and least similar regarding their attitudes toward union leaders. The supervisors’ attitudes toward both the union leaders and the company were more favorable than those of the hourly workers, and the attitudes of the hourly workers toward the union were more favorable than the supervisors’. Obrochta also found that the workers’ attitudes toward their foreman were somewhat more favorable than the supervisor’s attitude toward them. Further evidence on reciprocity or the lack of it was gathered by Derber, Chalmers, Edelman, et al. (1965) in a study of 37 industrial plants. The results indicated that managers’ attitudes toward the union and union leaders’ attitudes toward the management were positively and significantly correlated; each group was moderately favorable in its attitude toward the other. Obviously, there are variations and exceptions. For instance, Stagner, Chalmers, and Derber (1958), using separate scales for measuring attitudes toward the company and the union, found no relation between the management’s attitudes toward the union and the union’s attitudes toward the management. Yet in many firms, managers and union officials regard each other in generally favorable terms, despite the conflict between them about substantive issues, particularly issues involving their respective powers. Investigating managers in a southern city, Alsikafi, Jokinen, Spray, et al. (1968) suggested that unfavorable managerial attitudes toward the union tended to be connected with the inclusion in labor contracts of union security clauses that the managers perceived as challenging their authority to manage. Spillane (1980) noted that in contrast to a survey done in 1959, a survey done in 1978 found that the gap between the attitudes of Australian union leaders and Australian business executives had narrowed substantially. Both groups in the later survey strongly supported arbitration as a way of resolving industrial disputes. On the other hand, Edwards and Heery (1985) noted that when the interests of shop floor democracy in 35 British collieries came into conflict with the interests of union officials or national interests the local leaders upheld the concern for shop floor democracy.
In a plant of 3,400 employees, in which top management and union leaders espoused cooperation and mutual confidence, one-fourth of the shop stewards did not share information with the shop supervisors, and half of the supervisors held back from sharing information with the stewards. Yet in a survey of 263 U.S. firms, information exchange was reported as the most frequent form of union-management cooperation.
As elected officers appealing to their constituents, union leaders need to publicly enunciate more extreme points of view than their counterparts in management (Bass, 1965). To study perceptual distortions between 76 union officers in a central labor council and 108 human resources executives, Haire (1948) showed photographs of two middle-aged men to half of a sample: one photo was identified as secretary-treasurer of a union, the other as the local manager of a small plant. The identifications were switched for the other half of the sample. The union officials used a checklist to describe the photo identified as a union secretary-treasurer as that of a man who was conscientious, honest, trustworthy, responsible, considerate, cooperative, fair, and impartial. The human resources executives were even more complimentary in describing the same photo as that of a plant manager.
Differences in communication behavior show up when union stewards are compared with counterparts who are plant supervisors. Nonetheless, dual allegiance to the union and the company is the rule rather than the exception. This was seen in interviews with 202 employees in the garment, construction, trucking, grain processing, and metalworking industries. If the employees had favorable attitudes to either the union or the company, they had favorable attitudes toward the other as well. Dual allegiance was found in 73% of packinghouse employees, 88% of union stewards, and 57% of company supervisors (Purcell, 1953).
Three of every four first-line supervisors who were rated as promotable by their superiors were described by their subordinates as pulling for both the employees and the company. Only 40% of those seen as less worthy of promotion were so described (Mann & Dent, 1954b). Simultaneous upward and downward orientation and sensitivity are required of the effective supervisor, as a person in the middle. Sarbin and Jones (1955) reported that a successful supervisor not only is competent in the eyes of superiors but fulfills the expectations of subordinates. According to Wray (1949), this is not an easy task, since superiors and subordinates present conflicting expectations that are difficult to reconcile. Nonetheless, in his study of an industrial plant, H. Rosen (1961a, 1961b) found that managers could have an upward orientation toward the demands of their superiors while remaining sensitive to the demands of their subordinates. The experience of supervisors in their subordinates’ jobs has been found to be of consequence. Maier, Hoffman, and Read (1963) compared managers who had previously held the jobs of their subordinates with peers who had not held these jobs. Subordinates trusted mutual agreements about their current problems only when the agreements were made with managers who had previously been in the subordinates’ jobs, although a manager’s previous assignment to a subordinate’s job did not facilitate effective communication.
Conflict has a tendency to escalate and to be exacerbated by mirror imaging—attributing opposite qualities to the opposition in a conflict. Thus, “we” are honest, just, rational, and benevolent; “they” are dishonest, unjust, emotional, and malevolent. Leaders of groups, organizations, and nations tend to exploit and exaggerate these opposing attributions, as was seen among Americans who exhibited mirror imaging of Iranians soon after the American hostages were seized in Tehran in 1979 (Conover, Mingst, & Sigelman, 1980). However, McPherson-Frantz and Janoff-Bulman (2000) found in an experiment with college students about parent-adolescent conflict that partisanship could be ameliorated to the extent that partisans liked the opposing party. Instructions to be fair and unbiased resulted in reducing attention to arguments from both sides but also bolstered original partisan perspectives.
The marked decline in union membership in the United States in the past half century has been paralleled by a decline in studies of union-management relations. Furthermore, there has been a shift in unionization from industrial business to governmental agencies. Despite mirror imaging, K. F. Walker (1962) found that managers and union leaders were accurate in predicting each other’s attitudes, but both perceived more conflict than actually existed. Supervisors and shop stewards who wanted the company and union to coexist amicably experienced more stress than normal and tended to hold favorable attitudes toward each other (Purcell, 1954). However, the underlying bases for evaluating the management and the union differed. Stagner, Derber, and Chalmers (1959) surveyed the attitudes of two labor leaders and two managers in each of 41 establishments. When they computed a composite score for each establishment for each of 35 attitude and satisfaction variables, they found that the management’s evaluation of the union emerged as a single general factor but that the union’s evaluations were denoted by two factors, one involving union-management relations and the other concerned with the union’s achievements (1949). Miller and Remmers (1950) examined the attitudes of managers and labor leaders toward human relations–oriented supervision. Managers tended to overestimate labor leaders’ scores, whereas labor leaders underestimated managers’ scores. In a comparative study of managers and union officials, Weaver (1958) found, as expected, that union officials exhibited strong prolabor attitudes. But not as obviously, managers were neutral about grievances, arbitration, the labor movement, and working during a strike.
Schwartz and Levine (1965) compared the interests of managers and union officials in the same companies. The managers scored higher on interest in supervisory initiative and production, and the union officials scored higher on interest in seeking power and in propaganda, bargaining, arbitration, and disputation. Similarly, Bogard (1960) compared the values of management trainees and labor leader trainees and found that management trainees scored higher in aggressiveness and lower in altruistic values than the union trainees.
The management of conflict is an important component of most leadership roles. Thomas and Schmidt (1976) reported that middle managers spent more than 25% of their time dealing with conflict with their colleagues. The figure was even higher for first-line supervisors. Often, managing a conflict may involve gaining the acceptance of a resolution by persuading the conflicting employees, groups, or organizations that the proposed settlement will bring more benefits and less cost to both parties than continuing the dispute.
Leaders can manage conflict with supportive, friendly, obliging, compromising, and integrative efforts to move the parties from a competitive to a cooperative stance (Musser & Martin, 1988). The conflict between the felt security of employees in the old ways of doing things and changes required by new demands can be managed by a leader who instills pride in the past coupled with a need to meet the challenges of the future (Tichy & Devanna, 1986). According to Oscar Arias, a former president of Costa Rica, reelected in 2006, who has frequently been involved in international negotiation of conflicts, the negotiator needs patience but not passivity, perseverance but not inflexibility, commitment and respect for others’ viewpoints, skills in building trust, and the ability to compromise in good faith.
Diagnosis of the causes of a conflict is a rational way to begin to manage it. For example, if a conflict is due to a failure to match status and esteem, it can be reduced by incorporating the results of subordinates’ evaluations of esteem into promotional policies or building up the esteem of those with high status. If conflict is anticipated because of a rise in status of one member at the expense of the others, it can be avoided by bringing in an outsider to lead the group (Bass, 1960). Kabanoff (1985a) proposed a typology of conflict situations. Each type suggested a relevant rationale for its management. For instance, if a diagnosis showed that the team members’ esteem was lower than their actual ability and expertise, public praise could be used to increase their esteem. In addition, counseling could help peers increase their acceptance of expert but unesteemed members.
Kabanoff (1985a, 1985b) provided a list of diagnosed intrapersonal conflicts, such as conflict between one’s status and esteem, with implied or self-explanatory strategies for handling them. In addition, tactics were suggested for dealing with conflicts of status and esteem, when conflicts arose between low esteem and high-needed ability, low committment and high centrality, low popularity and high status, incompatability and required collaboration, low ability and required-high ability, low ability and high status, and low ability and a highly critical task.
Kindler (1996) focused on resolving interpersonal conflicts by suggesting ways a person such as a leader could deal with a conflict, depending on the diagnosis of the circumstances. The ways of dealing with such conflicts included direction, resistance, adapting, accommodating, and yielding. They also depended on a diagnosis of the intention to be firm or flexible, and on how involved a party in the conflict wanted to be in the resolution. According to Kindler, domination pressures the opposition to comply. This is a costly, inflexible alternative because of its potentially negative effects, but it may be necessary when speed is vital, when confidentiality prevents disclosing all the relevant facts, or when a stalemate cannot be ended. Smoothing is another inflexible tactic; it accentuates the information that supports the benefits of one’s position and steers the conversation away from alternatives that would intensify the opposition. Maintenance is a firm but interim tactic to deal with conflict when time is needed to collect information, calm emotions, enlist allies, take care of higher priorities, or allow nature to take its course—as when an obstinate opponent is expected to retire soon. Bargaining works when each side wants something that the other controls. Offers and counteroffers lead to a compromise agreement if both parties can gain from it. Coexisting is an agreement for the parties to follow separate paths until after additional testing, when an agreement on a single path can be made. Deciding by rule—such as by seniority, arbitration, or coin-flipping—may be appropriate when any alternative solution is better than none and decisive action is needed. Collaboration requires time, trust, and interpersonal competence with attentive listening and the probing of underlying assumptions in the search for creative solutions. Each side must be flexible and open about what it wants to see in the solution. Releasing allows the decision to be made by the other party, as when a flexible supervisor delegates the matter to the subordinate to handle after limitations on what is possible have been set. Yielding occurs when a flexible supervisor expresses a difference of opinion with a subordinate but agrees to go along with what the subordinate wants to do. It is useful in dealing with an issue that may be more important to the subordinate than to the supervisor.
Another approach to diagnosis of the conflict situation, leading to the use of political skills, was offered by Block (1987). Allies are those with whom you share a high level of trust; opponents can be trusted but are in disagreement with you over issues; bedfellows are in agreement but can’t be trusted; fence sitters can be trusted, but you don’t know their positions; and adversaries are those with whom trust and agreement are low. Like Kabanoff’s and Kindler’s models, solutions depending on the diagnosis are implied and need empirical testing.
Influence Tactics. The extent to which threats or promises were used for dealing with interpersonal, intergroup, and international conflicts was studied by Betz and Fry (1995). Promises were seen as more likely to be used in interpersonal conflicts, and threats as more likely to be used in intergroup and international conflicts. It was more important to use strength and force to resolve international conflicts. Filella (1971) queried 27 Spanish managers who formed the top three levels of their banking organization about how they dealt with disagreements with each other. In terms of the influence tactics described by Kipnis, Schmidt, and Wilkinson (1980), the bankers used reasoning most often, followed, in order, by the formation of coalitions, friendliness, assertiveness, bargaining, and appeals to a higher authority. Subordinates used all these tactics—except reasoning—more often than their superiors in trying to resolve disagreements with them. Rational justification appears to be particularly useful to superiors in heading off potential conflict and dissatisfaction when managers are faced with maintaining the status quo or with trying to promote change. Bies and Shapiro (1986) asked 137 evening MBA students who had full-time jobs during the day to recount an incident in which their current manager had rejected their proposal or request. The managers could reject the proposal or request without losing their subordinates’ respect, trust, and esteem if the subordinates judged that the managers provided good and sufficient justifications for their decision. Such justification was either that the issue was not in the manager’s control or that the request did not fit with goals and priorities. Managers who are facing the need to make changes likewise must be prepared to give their subordinates good and sufficient justification. According to Deluga (1986), the ambiguity of the employees’ role was unrelated to the influence tactics they used in dealing with their bosses. However, those who experienced more role conflict were more likely to use reason and assertiveness with their bosses than try to bargain with them. If a manager continued to resist their efforts to influence, the subordinates who felt more role conflict then tried ingratiation, impression management, flattery, the creation of goodwill, and gaining the support of the higher authority and their coworkers.
Although resistance to change is a problem in all social settings, it is both endemic and fraught with increasing penalties in productive and service enterprises that must deal with rapidly changing markets and technologies. Tichy and Devanna (1986) suggested that senior managers can assuage middle managers’ tension about the need for stability and change by creating organizations that “embrace paradox.” Such organizations can provide a balance between the need for adaptation and the need for stability and between the denial and acceptance of reality. (For example, “We’re not number one yet, but we will be.”) The old forms can be abandoned, and the new can be better.
Tichy and Devanna noted that senior managers must deal with technical reasons for resistance to change, such as habit, inertia, fear of the unknown, loss of organizational predictability, and sunk costs (the organization’s investment of resources in the old ways). Senior managers must also deal with political reasons for resistance to change, including the threat to currently powerful coalitions of vested interests, win-lose decision making about scarce resources, and fault found with their own previous decisions. They must likewise deal with cultural reasons for resistance to change, such as the extent to which the organizational culture has highlighted old values and methods that now must be abandoned. Or, they must handle the felt security in regressing to the “good old days.” The organization may lack a climate for change. There may be demands for conformity to the old ways, and a lack of receptivity to new ideas.
In managing the rational and socioemotional conflicts associated with resistance to change in industrial firms, senior managers must summarize the past and eulogize its value, emphasize the continuities of the past with the future, and justify the changes. To counter the political and socioemotional reasons, they must mobilize coalitions of support for the changes (Tichy & Devanna, 1986). Thus Kanter (1983) mentioned 200 change-masters—executives who could successfully bring about new developments in their organizations. They knew how to build coalitions to get the funds, staff, and authorization to move ahead to carry out their innovations.3
Palliation. Student participants in an experiment, whose anger and aggression had been aroused, could be induced to collaborate with an accomplice by palliating their anger and aggression. Baron (1984) arranged for undergraduate subjects to play the role of executives who discussed important issues with an accomplice of the experimenter. The accomplice disagreed strongly with the students in an arrogant and condescending manner that angered them. But subsequently, the accomplice palliated the situation by offering a token gift of candy (a Life Saver), by generating sympathy with justification for his earlier aggressive behavior, or by asking for help with a humorous task. These palliative efforts increased the like-ability of the accomplice. In contrast to the subjects in a control condition, in which such palliative efforts were not made, the subjects in the experimental condition indicated that they would be more likely to collaborate with the accomplice and be less likely to avoid him if conflict with him arose in the future.
Force and Avoidance. Dutch studies of a test for handling conflict found satisfactory agreement among self-reports, opponents’ reports, and observers’ ratings of forcing and yielding, but not avoiding (De Dreu, Evers, Beersma, et al., 2001) The use of force by superiors and avoidance by subordinates to manage the conflicts between them appears to be a matter of individual differences, for conflict is in the eye of the beholder. In some circumstances, some people see conflict with others but the others see none. To illustrate, in a study of one supervisor and one subordinate each from 113 agencies for parks and recreation, Howat and London (1980) found that the supervisors and subordinates who perceived more frequent conflicts were likely to be rated unfavorably and tended to see each other as more likely to use force as a way of dealing with conflict. Supervisors who perceived more conflicts were also viewed by their subordinates as likely to withdraw from conflict; subordinates who perceived more conflicts were viewed by their supervisors as likely to avoid confrontation and compromise. Sometimes avoiding the use of force turns a conflict into a tragedy. In 1995, a Dutch peacekeeping force stood by when Serbs took prisoner 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srbrenicia, Bosnia, and subsequently massacred them.
Identification. Halpin and Winer (1957) listed four ways for an airplane commander to manage conflicts with his superiors and subordinates: (1) he could identify completely with the higher authority and disparage the need to be considerate of the welfare of his subordinates; (2) he could reduce intimacy with his subordinates to minimize any guilty feelings he might have about having been inconsiderate of them; (3) he could be inconsiderate to his subordinates on the job but “pal around with them” off the job; (4) he could focus completely on satisfying the needs of his subordinates. Evidence in support of these findings accrued from a factor analysis by Hites (1953) of the results of a survey of aircrews. Hites noted that leaders varied in their loyalty and deference to superiors and also varied in their loyalty to their subordinates. That is, some commanders were loyal to their superiors, some were loyal to their subordinates, some were loyal to both, and some were loyal to neither. Halpin’s (1953) followup study of 89 commanders of B-29 aircraft found that the commanders were likely to be highly rated by their superiors and their subordinates if they exhibited consideration, friendliness, and warmth toward their subordinates and initiated clear patterns of organization and ways of accomplishing missions.
Pelz (1952) and Likert (1961a, 1961b) observed that managers in the middle can perceive themselves as members of overlapping subgroups. Effective leaders can see themselves as members of two groups: one composed of their superior and their peers, the other composed of their subordinates and themselves. They have sufficient influence with their superior (as members of their peer and superior group) to represent their subordinates’ interests effectively; they are well enough identified with their subordinates to be supported by them (as members, themselves, of their subordinates’ group). Thus, they are both good followers and good leaders, able to satisfy the expectations of both their subordinates and their superior.
Summarizing the results of organizational surveys, Kahn and Katz (1953, 1960) inferred that effective leaders differ from ineffective leaders in making it clear that their role differs from that of their subordinates. They do so by avoiding performing the subordinates’ functions; by spending time on supervision but not closely supervising subordinates; and by concerning themselves with their subordinates’ needs, rather than with rules. A chain effect was observed by Bowers (1963, 1964a), who studied management-supervisor-worker relations in an industrial firm. The more supportively the supervisor’s superior behaved toward him, the higher was the supervisor’s self-esteem. The higher the supervisor’s self-esteem, the less often he discussed his problems with subordinates and the better he perceived their attitudes toward him. The better the attitudes that the supervisor perceived his boss and subordinates sharing about him, the more he felt friendly toward his subordinates. The more friendly he felt, the more supportively he behaved toward his subordinates. Bowers concluded that the supervisor’s self-esteem converted the behavior of his boss into a mandate for the supervisor’s actions. A study of nursing supervisors by Kamano, Powell, and Martin (1966) provided corroborative evidence. These authors reported that supervisors who were evaluated more favorably by higher-level administrators likewise tended to rate their own subordinates more favorably.
Organizational Politics. The competing self-interests of people in an organization give rise to organizational politics. In this situation, the members vie for control in a struggle to obtain cooperation. Their different beliefs about desired actions and outcomes are complicated by their uncertainties over the link between means and ends. The win-lose possibilities of political activity are threatening to the members’ self-interests and are likely to arouse resistance if the politicking is open rather than concealed (Frost & Hayes, 1979).
Organizational politics may be seen in the performance of intrapreneurs, who break the organization’s rules to pursue new products and ideas in which they are personally interested (Pinchot, 1985). According to P. J. Frost (1986), politicking can be seen in the intentional building of frameworks of the rules and meanings of communication for systems of influence. Although the exertion of influence on the surface activities of the organization is primarily a matter of the appropriate open use of ability, power, and control of resources, organizational politics may be required, particularly if the deeper organizational structure calls for reshaping. Reshaping is necessary when the organization can no longer function with the old arrangements for balancing members’ self-interests. New alignments are needed to accomplish objectives in the face of likely resistance. Such legitimate politics can be seen in whistle-blowing (dissent based on principles) and bargaining. Conflicts can be reshaped by enlistment of critics, as when a legislative majority vote can come about only with the help of members of the opposition. Channels of communication need to remain open. The CEO must avoid letting the “palace guard” block the view from below or from organizational outsiders (Block, 1987).
Politicking is overtly rational, but much of the time it covertly caters to the self-interests of the political actor. It aims to confront others and gain their compliance by manipulative actions. At deeper organizational levels, it becomes an effort to shape conscious and unconscious organizational values, beliefs, and practices. Resistance from others is reduced by concealment of the true self-interests of the political actor. Machiavellian tactics are applied.
Machiavellian Tactics. Although it would seem that people in the middle use open compromise to manage the contradictory demands placed on them, they may employ more subtle or sometimes devious ways of momentarily reducing but not resolving conflict. First, all the conflicting parties may be told what they want to hear. For example, when he addressed liberal audiences, President Lyndon B. Johnson would emphasize how much he admired Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s liberal policies. When he met with his conservative financial backers, however, he would say how much he was against the liberal policies (Caro, 1982). Chairman Yasir Arafat of the Palestinian Authority talked about peace when addressing international and Israeli audiences in En glish. But when addressing Arab audiences in Arabic, he talked about driving Israel into the sea.
Persons in the middle may withhold information from superiors or subordinates and mask their feelings. Thus W. H. Read (1962) found that managers who communicated to their superiors with less than complete accuracy were more upwardly mobile. The relationship was conditioned by the extent to which managers trusted their superiors and perceived them to have influence with higher management. Walker, Guest, and Turner (1956) studied the problems of supervisors on an assembly line where the workers were under constant pressure because of their inability to control the speed of their work. The most effective supervisors were found to absorb the pressures and criticisms from higher management without communicating their frustrations and tensions to the workers.
In her survey of 350 managers, Roberts (1986) noted that managers in the middle said they were more inclined to try to impress their boss, somewhat less likely to try to impress their peers, and least likely to try to impress their subordinates. A negotiated solution was more often sought with the boss or peers than with the subordinates. Jambor (1954) suggested that persons in the middle of conflicts, between those above and those below them in the hierarchy, often yielded to their more powerful superiors and rationalized their position with their less powerful subordinates. Jablin (1981) observed the same pattern but thought that such political behavior might result in a loss of support from the subordinates. Subordinates who perceived their supervisors as highly political were less open in their communications with these supervisors and less satisfied with them than they were with other supervisors whom they saw as less political. This same effect was also noted by Roff (1950). Political behavior by combat officers led their immediate subordinates to rate them as less sincere, less impartial, and more concerned with personal advantage. Wickert (1947) found that an officer had to appear sincere and consistent to be rated as a successful leader of a combat crew. Elected officials are caught in a cauldron of conflicting demands from their various constituencies. Followers have difficulty checking on the authenticity of their leaders, who often can maintain office indefinitely without much need for sincerity and consistency. One person’s hypocrisy is another’s tactfulness. According to Titus (1950), hypocrisy may be necessary in dealing with followers, but minimal use should be made of it. Jameson (1945) noted that leaders need to “wear masks” to disguise their own feelings and to live up to expectations, despite conflicting demands made on them. Political leaders contrive both conflict and its resolution. For instance, the Nazis set fire to the Reichstag in 1933 and pinned the guilt on the communists, setting them up as criminal plotters against the government. In 1934, Joseph Stalin secretly arranged for the assassination of a party leader in Leningrad, then dramatized it as a plot against the state, providing a rationale for the terroristic purge that followed. In 1964, the Johnson administration contrived to magnify the Gulf of Tonkin incident into a major assault on the U.S. Navy so as to gain congressional support for escalation of the U.S. response in Vietnam. In 2003, George W. Bush took the United States to war in Iraq on the basis of intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, but this intelligence had been discredited a year earlier.
“Divide and conquer” is a classic strategy that Machiavellians use to gain and maintain their power over subordinates. Dissension within the opposition weakens it and keeps it from mobilizing effectively against those in control. Lawler (1983) examined how this strategy by an imaginary leader affected two female subordinates in a triad who were working under inequitable rates of pay. Conflicts of interest were increased between the subordinates, but co-optation—a promise of advancement—was more effective than threats in preventing their rebellion. The subordinate who was promised advancement was less susceptible to pressure from the other two subordinates to rebel against the imaginary leader. (For more on Machievellian tactics, see Chapter 7.)
Ignoring Dissonance. Political leaders may also avoid immediate conflict by ignoring the facts about the circumstances and relying on their own strongly held beliefs, needs, and wishes. When Hitler broke the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, he promised to keep the Treaty of Locarno of 1925. He broke the Treaty of Locarno, but he promised no further territorial aggression when his troops marched into the Saar in 1936. When he entered Austria by force in 1938, his government promised no interference in Czechoslovakia. Later in the year, at the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, when the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain and the French premier Édouard Daladier were confronted with such interference and more territorial demands, they ignored all of Hitler’s previous broken promises. For the sake of peace at any price, and because of their image of Hitler as a “bulwark against Bolshevism,” Chamberlain and Daladier engaged in wishful thinking. They appeased Hitler and relied again on his good faith. His troops occupied Czechoslovakia and attacked Poland in 1939.
Reserving Judgment. Barnard (1938) described the “fine art of executive decision” and noted that superiors’ demands for conflict-laden decisions by the executive must be met, but responsibility for them can be delegated. Subordinates’ demands for such decisions need be met only when the decisions are important, and they cannot be delegated. The tactful executive can avoid conflict-laden decisions on questions that are not pertinent, as well as premature decisions, impossible solutions, and decisions that others should make.
Effective Leadership. Shartle (1956) noted that efficacious organizational leaders are able to switch from one goal to another. This can be done if the leaders have a balanced, flexible set of identifications with various organizational projects and plans. If they find themselves blocked in one line of activity, they can shift to another, thus avoiding a sense of frustration and failure. J. M. Burns (1978, p. 39) saw conflict as an opportunity to display leadership. Leaders (in contrast to status quo administrators) convert the demands, values, and goals of conflicting constituencies into workable programs: “Leaders, whatever their professions of harmony, do not shun conflict; they confront it, exploit it, ultimately embody it. Standing at the points of contact among latent conflict groups, they can take various roles, sometimes acting directly for their followers, sometimes bargaining with others, sometimes overriding certain motives of followers and summoning others into play.”
Feyerheim (1994) observed influence patterns for a year in two groups that were formulating governmental regulations regarding pollution. Diverse interests were represented in these groups, but shared frameworks had to be developed so as to create solutions. Several individuals took the lead. The leadership that was most successful in shifting the frameworks highlighted assumptions, created new possibilities, and initiated collective actions.
Eisenstat (1954) found leadership to be ineffective when followers were apathetic toward an issue that required integrative action, when the leaders’ broader orientation did not correspond with the practical issues faced by the followers, when the leaders had no authority to deal with broader issues, and when the leaders were in conflict with other leaders.
Conflict Management Styles. Lehnen, Ayman, and Korabik (1995) used the Rahim Organizational Inventory (ROCI—Form B) to obtain descriptions of conflict management styles according to the subordinates of 120 Canadian vice principals of schools and managers from an accounting firm, a bank, and a manufacturer. Five styles are assessed by the ROCI: (1) integrating, (2) obliging, (3) compromising, (4) dominating, and (5) avoiding. Consistent with earlier investigations by Rahim and Buntzman (1989) and Witteman (1991), Lehnen, Ayman, and Korabik found that the integrative style (solving problems and listening considerately to subordinates) was most positively related to subordinates’ satisfaction with supervision. The avoiding style was most negatively related to subordinates’ satisfaction. What is required here is a belief that discussions of conflict can be constructive and that conflicting parties can be trusted to work toward effective outcomes if communications between them are open. According to Culbert and McDonough (1980), awareness of every member’s self-interests and the need to deal with them is essential to organizational and individual effectiveness. Subordinates need to confront their superiors about their needs. Out of this confrontation can come an alignment of the subordinates’ needs and the organization’s needs. The conflict between downward and upward demands can be best resolved through such open confrontation and discussion.
But evidence is mixed in support of this contention. On the one hand, according to a survey of 350 managers by Roberts (1986), a search for consensus was the most popular way for the managers to deal with their superiors, peers, and subordinates. Likewise, Friedlander and Margulies (1969) found that the task motivation and involvement of research personnel were maximized by their trust in management. Wilcox and Burke (1969) concluded that openness between workers and supervisors resulted in greater job satisfaction for both. Similarly, Klauss and Bass (1982) reported that colleagues were more satisfied with focal persons perceived as more open in their communications. In 147 established managerial work groups, Crouch (1986) found that managers were more willing to encourage the open expression of conflicting views and that they, as well as their subordinates, had little need to dominate. Strong dominant personalities were likely to suppress such conflict. Crouch also found that the work groups’ performance was enhanced to the extent the managers legitimized such open expression of conflicts in points of view.
However, Rubin and Goldman (1968) found no difference in the openness of communication of effective and ineffective managers. Crouch and Yetton (1987) suggested that the benefits of open group discussions depend on the leader’s skills in managing conflict. Willits (1967), who studied 20 small manufacturing firms, found that although the measures of their success were positively related to the president’s openness in communicating his ideas, as was expected, the ideas were negatively related to the open communication of his feelings. Furthermore, open communication by the other executives did not coincide with a company’s success.
Conflict Management by Political Appointees and Career Civil Servants. Even if they have strong political or professional credentials, new political appointees to senior management positions in public bureaucracies move into a situation that is inherently full of conflict. They must confront long-established rules and regulations, entrenched cliques, and deception from career civil servants who become defensive, passively obstruct new policies, and withhold or delay providing information to and from the appointees (House & Covello, 1984). For their part, the career governmental executives often must keep an agency operating while they await a new political appointee as its new head. Potential conflicts between incoming, newly appointed agency heads and permanent civil servants are likely to be minimized by a mutual understanding that is established before the appointee takes office, or is developed later. “Civil servants have some ideas of the thinking and requirements of their [newly appointed heads], and [the agency heads] acquire knowledge of the dispositions of their civil servants. A civil servant who gives advice is likely to frame it on the basis of his understanding of the needs of [the agency head], and [the head] is likely to modify his policy preferences on the basis of his knowledge of what is … feasible” (Page, 1987, p. 133).
To reduce potential conflicts with the incoming political head of the agency, Schmidt (1985) suggested that while awaiting the new head, the career executive should continue to make normal decisions about filling vacancies and about policies to be implemented or postponed, emphasize greater cooperation among antagonistic organizations, hold informational meetings, avoid the usurpation of power by bureaucratic processes, and try to keep rivalries about turf to a minimum. Newly appointed incompetent political heads and replacements of many experienced civil servants can quickly change an efficient agency of competent civil servants into an incompetent organization—as was seen in the disastrous handling by the Federal Emergency Management Agency of hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Converting Conflict to Problem Solving. Walton and McKersie (1965, 1966) and Likert and Likert (1978) thought that conflict can be managed best when it is converted from win-lose negotiations to a problem-solving situation from which both parties can emerge as winners. Furthermore, Likert and Likert noted that it is particularly important for conflicting parties to avoid becoming adversaries who debate solutions to a conflict before they have reached agreement on what outcomes they deem essential and desirable. This position is consistent with Bass’s (1966b) finding that negotiators who began with committed solutions were much more likely to reach a deadlock than those who entered negotiations without firm solutions in mind. It also fitted with Maier’s (1967, 1970b) results, which indicated that an early focus on ready-made solutions causes groups to avoid trying to find more creative ways to deal with their problems. Adversarial groups cling to their favorite solutions as they proceed with negotiations. Brams (1990) demonstrated how it was possible to use mathematical game theory to reach an overall greater gain for each side if both sides were disputing the weighted importance of the various divisive issues.
Changing Win-Lose to Win-Win. Conflict between union and management over costs and benefits may be resolved by working out arrangements to increase the returns both to management and to employees. Management can invite joint decision making and profit sharing and support the importance of seniority, security, and pension benefits. The union can support the redesign of jobs, the introduction of cost-reduction techniques, and the retraining of employees. The management and the unions can collaborate on safety programs. Win-lose bargaining is converted into win-win problem solving. At the level of the individual union and management representative, Rosen, Greenhalgh, and Anderson (undated) pointed out that studies have found that union stewards may spend an average of 11 hours per week on socioemotional leadership functions, as do their counterparts in management in dealing with the absenteeism, insecurities, and grievances of employees.
Druckman (1994) conducted a meta-analysis of 82 experimental studies of negotiating to reach compromises and the time required in 28 of them to reach a compromise. Compromises were more difficult to negotiate when: (1) the negotiators were representing constituents and did not expect to have any further interaction with the opponents in the future; (2) the negotiators prepared strategies in cohesive groups beforehand; (3) bureacratic superiors introduced competitive orientations and new strategies; (4) negotiations took place with an audience and under face-saving pressures; (5) long-held social attitudes and contrasting ideologies were involved; (6) a tough exploitative opponent was faced.
Institutionalizing Collaboration. A mature, collaborative approach substitutes a mutually acceptable culture and a common philosophy for minutely detailed agreements that cover all possible contingencies. Fixed periodic negotiations are replaced by joint study groups and more open discussions. A reward system is determined, but the levels of reward are not (Lawler & Mohrman, 1987). According to Long’s (1988) survey of two Canadian firms, managers were most likely to favor such a collaborative approach if they were dissatisfied with the behavioral and attitudinal conditions in the firm and if they thought that increasing the workers’ influence on policy decisions would improve these conditions. In 1987, General Motors and the United Auto Workers agreed to establish continuous joint methods for addressing specific issues at each plant. The objective was to design solutions that would improve the efficiency of each plant and the quality of its products. Johnson (1988) thought that such continuous joint processes worked well if the local manager was adept at mobilizing the skills and energies of the workers and providing them with sound direction. Continuous joint process emphasizes mutual listening and the sharing of information and ideas. But managers need to have more than just labor’s interests in mind; they are also custodians of the interests of the shareholders and various other constituencies of the corporation, and they are concerned with its need to remain competitive in the international marketplace.
Promoting Congruence of the Formal and Informal Organization. A leader can avoid or reduce conflict by fostering congruence of status, esteem, and competence within the group and its activities, and congruence between the informal and the formal organization. For example, formal-informal incongruencies were seen within technical units of the U.S. Air Force. On the one hand, the formal and informal organizations agreed that cooperation and pride in the formal organization were desirable and that the most competent personnel were most valuable. On the other hand, the formal and informal organizations had conflicting attitudes about punishment for laxity and the need for high standards of performance (Anonymous, 1945–1946). Leadership increased the congruence in attitudes. According to Whyte and Gardner (1945), leaders of the formal organization foster such congruence by becoming aware of the informal organization, discovering the informal leader, and obtaining his or her cooperation and agreement to work toward common goals. Formal leaders use the informal organization constructively to convey attitudes, to locate grievances, and to maintain social stability (K. Davis, 1951). They identify the differences and values that buttress the informal organization relative to the formal organization.
“Legitimatization” of a role refers to others’ perception of an individual’s right to function in a given position. An individual’s appointment to a given position legitimates his or her status and performance of the role, at least for those who do the appointing. Likewise, in democracies, election to an office legitimates the role of the office-holders in the eyes of those who voted for them as well as in the eyes of most others. In traditional societies, legitimacy can be provided by inherited status and rank as well as election or appointment. For instance, Vengroff (1974) noted that it made no difference in community participation in the development of 31 villages in Botswana whether the leaders were elected councilors or were traditional tribal chiefs. But conflict would arise when what was regarded as legitimate for one member in one situation was viewed as illegitimate for others in the same situation or different situations. Although legitimacy might be lost if an individual fails to perform as expected, the legitimacy of an appointment has to be sharply separated from competence or perceived competence to perform the role. C. B. Smith’s (1984) experiment showed that the presence or absence of competence in appointed supervisors did not affect the legitimacy of their authority or the conformity of subordinates to organizational directives.
Legitimacy is affected by the culture in which an appointment is embedded. It is not just a matter of agreeing on a list of uniformly interpretable regulations about appropriate behavior in the organization. Indeed, it is a fundamental source of conflict in that what is legitimate depends on both written and unwritten rules whose creation and interpretation are a developing process of shared meanings. In analyzing the relationship between the CEO and vice presidents of a Bell Telephone operating company, Feldman (1986) noted that the meaning attached to the positions held by the executives was often overlooked. The meaning is provided by the cultural system of the bureaucracy. In turn, it restricts the courses of action that are open to position holders. Neilsen and Rao (1987) agreed that the meaning of legitimacy that emerges about a position is a dynamic process, which develops as new ideas and understandings are accepted within the organization. The meaning is enhanced when it is given more credence from demonstrations of trustworthiness as hidden agendas surface. Additionally, the language that reinforces the legitimacy of a leader’s actions is multilayered. At the institutional level, shared meanings evolve from history and habit. For instance, many business leaders may be legitimately consumer-oriented rather than technology-oriented because their business has been driven by customers’ loyalty and interests. At another level, such meanings may be supported by stories and myths. A customer-oriented engineer may convince a new client about the product with a humorous demonstration. At a third level, theories are articulated that legitimately guide action. Changing market conditions add more response to clients’ needs. Finally, “symbolic universes of meaning” buttress legitimacy. Modern professional management is more market-oriented than traditional management was.
As was already noted, discrepancies between what others expect and one’s own expectations will be a source of role conflict. A group’s failure to achieve consensus in its expectations about requirements likewise causes conflict. Conversely, agreement about role requirements and conformity to normative expectations about what is legitimate action for the role generally contribute to effectiveness in organizational life.
Many research analysts point to similarities and differences in opinions about what constitutes departures from legitimacy and the effects of such departures in political, educational, military, and industrial settings. For example, Schein and Ott (1962) studied the attitudes of managers, union leaders, and college students toward the legitimacy of influencing various kinds of behavior. The three groups and a sample of U.S. Air Force personnel (F. J. Davis, 1954) agreed about the legitimacy of influencing job-related behaviors. The groups considered it legitimate for a supervisor to try to influence the job performance and work environment of employees. However, they differed about the legitimacy of a supervisor’s trying to influence behavior that was not job-related.
Public and Community Settings. Substantive conflicts over the legitimatization of the leader’s rights can best be cataloged in the context of their social settings. Numerous examples have been reported of a loss or lack of legitimacy due to incongruities, discordant expectations, and within-role and between-role conflict. These incongruities resulted in dissatisfaction and ineffectiveness. Homemakers are faced with the same pressures to deal with new technologies and ambiguous standards of quality as professionals and managers are. However, because homemakers are not accorded the social legitimacy that professionals and managers receive, they experience an unusual conflict (Chafetz & Dworkin, 1984). For instance, homemakers are likely to see themselves as lacking the power and resources to confront a manufacturer of a shoddy product. Conflict may be sharper in public bureaucracies because of their legal obligations to respond to clients who can exert pressure on them. Conflict within public bureaucracies is exacerbated when the external political climate restricts objective goal setting and evenhanded decision making (J. M. Burns, 1978). Those who are at the outer boundaries of a bureaucracy are much more likely to face such politically based conflict than those who are deep inside the organization (Katz & Kahn, 1966).
Each of several resettlement communities in Israel that Eisenstadt (1954) studied had developed specific norms. At the same time, the communities had also incorporated the norms of the surrounding culture. The norms prescribed proper behavior for given roles and role situations. To some extent, reference group norms served as general standards by which various patterns of behavior were evaluated. Because of their wider range of reference groups, the leaders served as a medium for consolidating the subgroups and integrating them into an effective larger group.
Business and Industry. In a study of managers’ attitudes, Schein and Lippitt (1966) found that managers whose roles involved close supervision and centralization of responsibility regarded it as legitimate to influence subordinates in more areas than did other managers. Contrary to the hypothesis, managers whose subordinates had more visible roles and interacted more frequently with outsiders did not exercise more influence than those whose subordinates had less visible roles.
Both superiors and subordinates expected communication, development, delegation, understanding, know-how, and teamwork from supervisors (Brooks, 1955). But for the supervisors, their own autonomy was more critical to them than their legitimacy. In a study of first-line supervisors, Klein and Maher (1970) found that the supervisors’ lack of autonomy was related to role conflict, but neither the perceived legitimacy of autonomy nor the discrepancy between legitimate and actual autonomy was related to it. However, Ulrich, Booz, and Lawrence (1950) observed that superiors made legitimate but conflicting demands on managers.
Conflict was latent in Freeman and Taylor’s (1950) survey of 100 top executives. These executives said they looked for aggressive, energetic applicants for management positions in the company, even though they personally wanted “tactful subordinates.” The executives attributed their own success to “brains and character,” but they preferred “emotionally controlled and balanced” rather than overly bright or highly ethical subordinates. Conflict was illustrated most clearly when the executives’ self-perceptions were compared with those of 170 middle managers. Whereas the executives emphasized their self-determination, enterprise, and dignity, the middle managers emphasized their discreetness, modesty, practicality, patience, deliberateness, and planfulness. Whereas the top executives disavowed stinginess, shyness, and a lack of ambition, the middle managers avoided describing themselves as reckless, disorderly, aggressive, and outspoken (Porter & Ghiselli, 1957). However, Bass, Waldman, Avolio, et al. (1987) generally found positive correlations between what subordinates in New Zealand said they required in the leadership of their supervisors and what the supervisors, in turn, required of their bosses. This domino effect suggested that, in reality, there tend to be more positive than negative associations in what is legitimated for supervisory roles at each successive level in the organization, although some strong bosses may prefer to keep their subordinates weak in power and autonomy.
Wernimont (1971) found that workers tended to make contradictory demands on their supervisors. On the one hand, they expressed a desire for clear instructions and goals. On the other hand, they wanted considerable freedom to work in their own way. Similarly, Foa (1956) compared ideal and actual descriptions of the behavior of first-level supervisors and workers in Israeli factories. He found that the workers complained most frequently about their supervisors’ ineffective social relations but were more critical of their own conduct than of their supervisors’ conduct. But the supervisors complained little about work behavior. The smaller the discrepancy between the workers’ ideal for the supervisors and their descriptions of a supervisors’ actual behavior, the better satisfied the workers were with the supervisor. When the workers identified with their supervisors, they attributed their own ideals to the supervisor.
There seems to be a fundamental difference in the ideals of managers’ roles and how managers are actually required to enact the roles. Hortatory admonitions, managerial ideals, popular literature, and normative expectations all counsel the need for system and deliberation at every level. As McCall (1977) noted, the assumption is that managers are likely to be engaged in just a few events and will have enough time to ponder over how they should behave in response to these events. In reality, however, the demands on a typical manager make such deliberation impossible. For example, Guest (1956) found that supervisors were involved in 200 to 583 activities in a single day. S. Carlson (1951) reported that Swedish top executives were undisturbed for only an average of 23 minutes during a day. Mintzberg (1973) found that half the activities of the five top executives he observed lasted nine minutes or less and concluded that the executives’ activities were fragmented, brief, and varied and that the executives had little control over them. Also, 93% of the executives’ contacts were arranged ad hoc, and the executives initiated only 32% of them.4
Educational Settings. Generally, students are prepared to accept direction from instructors who are behaving legitimately. Torrance (1959) studied groups that were under different degrees of pressure from instructors to accept a new food. He found that group members expected instructors to exercise influence and that they did not perceive such influence as pressure. In Lee, Horwitz, and Goldman’s (1954) experiment, each of three instructors of classes of ROTC cadets was given more authority or less authority to decide whether certain instructions should be repeated. Most students voted to repeat the instructions, but in each class, the instructor arbitrarily decided not to repeat the assignment. The instructor met the greatest resentment and hostility when the students believed he had little authority to make a decision. The rejection was even greater when the instructor acted as if he had a great deal of authority but did not have it. If the students believed the instructor had the authority, he could act in this manner and was less resented by the students for doing so.
M. V. Campbell (1958) reported that when teachers’ needs and role behavior were close to the principal’s expectations for them, the teachers tended to feel better satisfied, were more confident in the principal’s leadership, and were rated by the principal as more effective. Seeman (1953, 1960) found among principals and teachers in 26 communities that although the teachers expected their principal to attend to matters within the school, the principal’s success in improving the school situation depended on devoting time to public relations outside the school. When principal and teachers disagreed about the principal’s role, the principal reported less indecision than the teachers, because the principal was required to take action more often than the teachers were.
Gross, Mason, and McEachern (1958) and Gross, McEachern, and Mason (1966) studied role conflict in school superintendents. They found that the superintendents differed in their perceptions of the legitimacy of the various expectations that others held for them. In particular, the superintendents differed about the severity of sanctions that might be applied if they did not comply with what they thought was expected of them. Those superintendents with a moralistic orientation tended to conform to what they regarded as legitimate expectations but rejected expectations they regarded as illegitimate, regardless of the sanctions that might be involved. Those with an expedient orientation tended to conform to the expectations that were attended by the strongest sanctions for noncompliance, or to compromise between what they actually would do and what they expected to do to minimize possible sanctions. A third type of superintendent gave equal weight to legitimacy and possible sanctions.
Gross, Mason, and McEachern (1958) also studied reference group identifications and consensus among superintendents and members of school boards. The superintendents were more strongly identified than the school board members with external professional reference groups. In the division of responsibilities, both the superintendents and the members of the school boards assigned more tasks to themselves and expressed great approval for bypassing each other. Superintendents rated the school boards more highly and were better satisfied with them when there was consensus among the board members. In turn, the greater the consensus on the board, the higher was its rating of the superintendent.
Military Settings. Numerous military studies have examined the effects of role sanctions, legitimacy, and conflict. For instance, Greer (1954) reported finding that in six hours of simulated combat, only among the more effective of 26 infantry rifle squads did appointed leaders act more closely to what was desired and expected of them by the rest of the squad. Failure to live up to subordinates’ expectations resulted in conflict and the squads’ ineffectiveness.
Stouffer, Suchman, DeVinney, et al. (1949) found that U.S. officers and enlisted personnel disagreed markedly during World War II on whether officers should maintain social distance from enlisted personnel. Although 82% of the enlisted personnel agreed that “an officer will have the respect of his men if he pals around with them off duty,” only 27% of the captains, 39% of the first lieutenants, and 54% of the second lieutenants agreed. Similarly, E. L. Scott (1956) found that enlisted personnel on small ships perceived the organization’s status structure more accurately when superiors interacted less extensively throughout the organization, retained authority, and delegated less freely. Merton and Kitt (1950) discovered that enlisted personnel who expressed attitudes in conformity with the norms of the U.S. Army were promoted more rapidly. If the enlisted personnel accepted the status structure of the army as legitimate, they were more readily identified with others at their own level or those of the next highest status level.
The effects of more legitimacy or less legitimacy were examined by Levy (1954), who contrasted aircrews led in periodic discussions by their own commanders with air-crews whose discussions were led by clinical psychologists. Members of the groups led by their commanders had more favorable attitudes toward their groups and a greater sense of well-being than members of groups led by the clinical psychologists.
In the military, the most extreme conflicts between subordinates and higher authority are likely to arise when acts of collective insubordination occur, despite fears of reprisal. In the Israeli defense forces, these acts seem to be due to unresolved grievances about impersonal conditions, such as slow demobilization, poor food, unacceptable discipline, or unfair discrimination, rather than individual resentment (Gal, 1985). Personal conflict over goals and commitments (Rose, 1982), such as occurred among American servicemen in Vietnam and Israeli soldiers in Lebanon in 1982, produced withdrawal or protest rather than group revolt. Gal (1985) saw a need for legitimacy in military decision making to deal with such personal conflicts. Decisions must serve proper goals, must be made through appropriate processes, and must be in accord with a common value system with which the individual soldier identifies.
Various conditions can be enumerated that enhance or reduce legitimacy and, therefore, affect the amount of conflict and inefficiency that occurs. For instance, legitimacy depends on clear, accepted group norms. B. R. Clark (1956) found that high-status members of a group could not be fully legitimate if the group norms were not clearly defined and were not well accepted by the members. Legitimate power can enhance the positive impact of a leader’s effectiveness. Knapp and Knapp (1966) studied elected officers and nonofficers who served as group leaders in a verbal conditioning experiment. Groups led by officers had a higher rate of response and conditioned more readily than groups led by nonofficers. Official status of the leaders facilitated the groups’ learning. The importance of legitimate power was illustrated in a Dutch experiment by Mulder, Van Dijk, Stirwagen, et al. (1966). The power distance between leaders and followers was varied by permitting leaders to distribute rewards of different amounts. The legitimate leader was elected by the group. The illegitimate leader (a confederate of the experimenter) forced his way into the experimental control booth and took over the leadership function. Under conditions of great power distance, the followers resisted the illegitimate leader more than they did the legitimate leader. P. B. Read (1974) demonstrated how conflict arose among jurors in mock trails if their differences of opinion were legitimate. Paradoxically, organizations with excessive levels of hierarchy and excessive dependence on the differentiation of power are hotbeds of politics and conflict (Culbert & McDonough, 1985). For communications to move through the excessive layers requires an illegitimate bypassing of channels. For timely decisions to be made, illegitimate actions may be needed. For work to get done, the pursuit of creative ad hoc alternatives may be required, rather than conformity to the rules.
Election versus Appointment. Experimentation offers an opportunity to compare the legitimatization of the leadership role by election and by appointment. When N. A. Rosen (1969), in an industrial field experiment, used the preference of work group employees to reassign those who became their supervisors, all seven groups showed initial increases in productivity. Similarly, Ben-Yoav, Hollander, and Carnevale (1983) gave a decision-making task to 21 groups of four college students each and compared leaders who were appointed or elected. Elected leaders were considered more responsive to the followers’ needs, more interested in the group task, and more competent than those who were appointed. Dellva, McElroy, and Schrader (1987) compared 64 formally appointed leaders with leaders who emerged in student groups at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. Over time, the formally appointed leaders tended to lose influence, whereas the emergent leaders gained influence. Raven and French (1957) instructed experimental groups to elect one of their members as supervisor and subsequently replaced the supervisors of half the groups with appointed leaders. These researchers found that in contrast to the appointed leaders, the elected leaders became more personally attractive to the other members and their suggestions were more likely to be accepted by the groups. In the same vein, Hollander and Julian (1970) found that members of problem-solving groups were more willing to accept a selfish action by an elected leader than the same action by an appointed leader. In another experiment by Hollander and Julian (1970), team members ranked the relative importance of several items, and the leaders could accept each ranking or reverse it. Elected leaders deviated from their groups more than appointed leaders. Both types of leaders deviated more if they had strong rather than weak support from group members. The authors concluded that more is expected of elected than appointed leaders. Elected leaders are given greater latitude to deviate and act on behalf of the group’s goals; but to profit from this advantage, they must be aware of it.
When spokespersons for a group were elected rather than appointed, their legitimacy was greater, but they were more likely than appointed spokespersons to be rejected if they were seen as incompetent or as unable to produce results. Nonetheless, the appointed spokesper-sons also had to be competent or successful in order to satisfy the group members (Julian, Hollander, & Regula, 1969). According to Hollander (1978), election created greater demands by group members for their spokesperson’s performance. The elected spokespersons showed greater firmness than the appointed spokespersons, who were as firm only if they could consult their members (Hollander, Fallon, & Edwards, 1977). Elected spokes-persons also felt freer to yield (Boyd, 1972) and to accept or reject the decisions of the group they were representing (Hollander & Julian, 1970). This is consistent with the finding that elected leaders evaluated their followers more highly than appointed leaders did (Elgie, Hollander, & Rice, 1988). But appointed leaders, when representing their own groups, could achieve agreement with each other about the solutions to problems more easily and with less conflict than elected leaders in the same circumstances (Manheim, 1960).
The Struggle for Status and Legitimacy. When all members of a community, a work unit, or an experimental setting are initially equal in status (the value of their initial positions in their groups), a struggle for status will result. In an informal discussion, no one initially has the “right to lead.” Gaining the right to lead and obtaining the status of leader will depend on individual initiative, assertiveness, competence, and esteem. To the degree that individuals strive for status, a struggle for status is likely to occur unless a leader has been elected or appointed in advance. Many factors will affect this struggle, including each contestant’s self-esteem and credibility. Furthermore, leaders seem more concerned than followers about maintaining their status. Gallo and McClintock (1962) studied leaders and nonleaders in sessions where three accomplices were present. The accomplices supported the participants in the first session but withdrew their support in the second session. The researchers found that leaders initiated more task-oriented behaviors than followers, especially when their positions were threatened during the second session. The leaders also exhibited more hostility and antagonism when their status was threatened. Gartner and Iverson (1967) informed experimental groups that one member would be selected for a superior position in another group. This chance for upward mobility in status interfered with the task performance in well-established groups but reduced the members’ morale rather than their productivity in newly formed groups.
The struggle for status is most likely among a group of strangers. But if the abilities and past performance records of members are made clear to all, and if their esteem is made more visible, the conflict about who will lead is reduced. Bradford and French (1948) emphasized that the productivity of group thinking depended on the ability of group members to clearly perceive each other’s roles. Drucker (1946) observed that despite the informality of relations among executives in the different divisions of General Motors, the executives worked together with relatively little conflict. The absence of conflict was attributed to objective measures of the performance of the divisions that made the effectiveness of the executives visible to each other.
Overestimated Self-Accorded Status. The struggle for status is augmented by a general tendency of members of organizations and groups to overestimate their own status and power (Bass, 1960; Bass & Flint, 1958a). They believe that their positions are more important than others do. In this situation, role conflict is inevitable. People at a designated organizational level think that all those below them have “smaller” jobs than the job holders themselves think they have; and all those above the person at the designated level perceive that the occupants’ jobs are “smaller” than the occupants perceive these jobs to be (Haas, Porat, & Vaughan, 1969). This bias is quite general. J. D. Campbell (1952) found that 250 residents of Boston tended to rate the value of their own jobs higher than they rated jobs similar to their own. Conflict results when people who interact or work together overestimate the importance of their own positions and underestimate the importance of others with whom they interact. For example, a janitor of an apartment house may adopt “professional standards” and accord himself more status than his tenants grant that he has (Gold, 1951–1952). When supervisors accord themselves more status and authority than their unionized subordinates grant them, their attempts to lead their subordinates will be rebuffed (Wray, 1949).
Bass and Flint (1958a) showed with 51 groups of ROTC cadets that although members with greater power attempted more leadership and were seen by others as having exhibited more success, they actually were no more successful. Moreover, high-control5 members significantly overestimated their esteem compared with low-control members. The control and power differences that were arbitrarily assigned to some of these participants were likely to have aroused hostility and resentment among those without control. Although low-control members perceived themselves as submitting to the powerful members, a greater proportion of them actually rejected the attempts to lead by the arbitrarily more powerful members.
Self-Authorization. Morrison and Phelps (1999) surveyed 275 white-collar employees to ascertain what made some of them authorize themselves to take charge despite a lack of status that made their efforts questionable. Factor and regression analyses established that three factors contributed most to such self-authorizing behavior: (1) felt responsibility, (2) self-efficacy, and (3) top management’s openness. These factors explained 27% of the variance in self-authorization.
Credibility. Legitimatization involves gaining credibility for being trustworthy and informative. Klauss and Bass (1982) found strong positive correlations in social service agencies, military organizations, and industrial firms between subordinates’ ratings of managers’ credibility and the managers’ success as leaders. One establishes one’s trustworthiness by gaining “membership character,” by being seen as loyal to the group, by conforming to the prevailing norms, and by establishing that one is motivated to belong to and identify with the group (Hollander, 1958).
Stability of Legitimacy and Leadership. The stability of legitimate power and the tendency of leaders to hold on to their offices are fostered by at least five factors: (1) the validators, (2) continuing redefinitions, (3) acquisition of relevant information, (4) controlling the resources that are needed for change and thwarting the restructuring of the situation, (5) maintaining favorable conditions. In regard to the first factor, validation, Hollander (1978) pointed out that leaders have validators of their positions who can support the leader’s legitimacy or withdraw support. The validators uphold the leader’s right to office even when a leader’s performance may be inadequate. Unable to admit their errors, because they have an investment in and a sense of responsibility for the leader, they continue to support a failing leader (Hollander, Fallon, & Edwards, 1977). The second factor, redefinition, was demonstrated by A. R. Cohen (1958). Cohen found that leaders who are threatened with losing their status can redefine their groups’ boundaries to isolate themselves from the very members whose support they need. High-status members, faced with the loss of status, communicated less with low-status members than did high-status members who were not facing a loss of status. The third factor, acquisition of knowledge, is illustrated by an incumbent political leader who amasses knowledge of rules and regulations; develops the required organizational constituents, contacts, and contracts; acquires the trappings of power; and is more visible than rival candidates for the office. The fourth factor, control of change, involves high-status members blocking the restructuring of a situation if a new structure would cause them to lose their status (Burnstein & Zajonc, 1965b). Those with high status control the machinery for change. In authoritarian states, dictators coerce the opposition; in democratic states, elected officials use their legitimate power to reject electoral reforms in financing, redistricting, limited terms of office, and so on that would threaten their reelection. Party officials in the former Soviet Union were most reluctant to relinquish their power, privileges, and perquisites. Over 99% of members in the U.S. House of Representatives sought reelection and were reelected to office in 1988 (Rosenbaum, 1988). Maintaining conditions favorable to the leader is the fifth factor. Katz, Blau, Brown, and Strodtbeck (1957) studied four-member groups who first engaged in a discussion about possible tasks. The members then chose a task for the next session, in which half of all the groups performed the chosen task and the other half were required to complete tasks imposed on them. The chance that a member would remain a leader from the first discussion to the completion of the chosen or imposed task depended on whether the task was chosen by the group or imposed by the experimenter. If the group’s choice of task was guided by the leader, the imposition of a different task threatened his leadership. However, his position was strengthened if he did not enforce the imposed task that the group rejected. In addition, the more the leader stirred up controversy about the choice of tasks during the first discussion, the less likely he was to remain a leader during the task-completion phase. If the leader experienced little initial opposition to his choice of task and his choice was supported by the group, he was more likely to retain his leadership than if a different task was arbitrarily imposed on the group by the experimenter.
Changes in the Behavior of Leaders. Only after the struggle for status has ended and a stable hierarchy has been organized can those who achieved the high status reduce their level of activity (Heinicke & Bales, 1953; Whyte, 1953). Once a person is fully recognized by the other members as the leader and has won the struggle for status, he or she needs to attempt less leadership in order to exhibit the same amount of successful leadership. Thus, Bass, Gaier, and Flint (1956) found that when all members of a group of ROTC cadets had equal control over each other, any member had to attempt more than the average amount of leadership to exhibit more than the average amount of observable leadership. But when the members of a group differed initially in their control over each other, the successful leader did not require as many attempts to lead.
Usurpation. When the legitimate leader continues to be inadequate in meeting the needs of the group, the role may be usurped. However, the usurper may not do as well in the leadership role as the legitimate leader. According to Crockett (1955), who studied conference leadership, emergent leaders tended to take control when the designated chairperson failed to set enough goals, seek enough information, and propose enough problems and solutions. Usurpation also occurred when cliques with divergent goals were present. Similarly, Lowin and Craig (1968) found that members initiated more structure in work groups when their superiors were incompetent. Katz, Maccoby, Gurin, et al. (1951) found the same usurpation of leadership in groups of men who were engaged in railroad maintenance work. Heyns (1948) observed that if the appointed leader of a group fails to perform his or her duties satisfactorily, the attempts by other group members to assume leadership are more readily accepted than they would be if the leader were adequate. P. J. Burke (1966a, 1966b) noted that disruptive behavior in experimental groups was significantly related to the leader’s failure to establish an authority structure. Stog-dill (1965a) found that in metal shops in which the work was precise and a piece could be ruined by interference and horseplay, the workers applied pressure on deviant group members when the supervisor failed to provide structure. In textile mills, women operators of high-speed sewing machines who were paid on an output basis applied pressure on deviant members if their supervisors were inexperienced or failed to keep order. Many other investigators have concluded that members initiate needed actions in a group if the leader fails to do so.6
Replacement of Leaders. In addition to the democratically required replacement of term-limited heads of state, governmental, ministerial, and agency leaders are deposed as a consequence of their failure to serve their constituencies, or they are replaced when their validators or higher authorities lose confidence in their competence (Hollander, 1978). Also, they may fall out of favor politically. In business and industry, for the years 1988 to 1992, Ward, Bishop, and Sonnenfeld (1999) compared voluntary exits by the CEOs of 1,000 corporations with exits forced by the boards of directors because of poor performance, personal mismanagement, illegal improper behavior, strategic disagreement, personality clashes, takeovers, and single issues such as the failure of a pet project. The replacement process was costly to the initiators of the replacement and to those deposed. The boards that forced out a CEO underwent much more involuntary change themselves afterward than after a CEO voluntarily retired or exited amicably.
Personality Differences in Reactions to Conflict. People vary in their willingness to subject themselves to conflict and to serve in marginal roles. Those who are higher in task orientation and lower in interpersonal orientation, as measured by the Orientation Inventory (Bass, 1963), have shown that they are more ready to engage in conflict in small-group discussions (Bass, 1967c) and are more likely to accept marginal roles. Marginal roles exist between groups with conflicting norms, values, and goals (Stonequist, 1937). Individuals who prefer such marginal roles have lower social needs (Ziller, 1973), are less extroverted (Wonder & Cotton, 1980), and reveal a higher task orientation and a lower interpersonal orientation (Cotton & Cotton, 1982).
Other personality differences make some leaders more prone than others to generate conflict with their subordinates, with consequential losses in effectiveness. Tjosvold, Andrews, and Jones (1983) asked 310 medical technicians to describe the cooperative, competitive, and individualistic orientations of their immediate superiors. The technicians’ satisfaction, desire to perform well, and willingness to remain in their jobs were reduced substantially if they reported that their leaders were competitive and individualistic rather than cooperative. Kohn (1986) came to similar conclusions after a review of other survey and experimental investigations. Even among business leaders, there seems to be more interpersonal payoff from a cooperative than from a competitive outlook.
These personality differences in competitiveness and cooperativeness manifest themselves in feelings about conflict and reactions to it. They can be understood through a model created by Blake and Mouton (1964) and Thomas (1976). As Figure 13.1 shows, individuals differ in their concern for themselves and for others as well as in their assertiveness. Self-concern and assertiveness give rise to competitiveness; self-concern and a lack of assertiveness produce avoidance and withdrawal; assertiveness and a concern for others yield collaboration; and a lack of assertiveness and a concern for others generate accommodation. Compromise is literally an in-between result. According to Blake and Mouton (1964), ideal leaders are both assertive and concerned about others. They deal with conflict by integrating conflicting ideas through collaborative problem solving.
Kabanoff (1985a) validated Blake and Mouton’s model of conflict by asking 104 MBA students to describe their feelings, reactions, and preferred ways of dealing with various overt or covert conflicts described in scenarios. Four of the five ways of coping emerged as expected. The exception was a finding that accommodation was equally acceptable to the unassertive respondent whether he or she was self-concerned or concerned about others. A factor analysis by Rahim (1983) of the self-descriptions of a national sample of 1,219 executives on how they deal with conflict substantiated the a priori conceptualization of the five independent styles of coping with conflict. A factor analysis by Kipnis, Castell, Gergen, et al. (1976) resulted in a modified version of Blake and Mouton’s model for how husbands and wives resolve their disagreements. Using the model, Rim (1981) found that the spouses’ values affected how they resolved conflicts with each other. For example, they were more likely to be accommodating if both valued broadmindedness, independence, loving, and true friendship but not self-control. An empirical personality assessment by Kilmann and Thomas (1975) provided further indirect support for Blake and Mouton’s model. For example, introverts avoided conflict, and extroverts collaborated. Terhune (1970) and Jones and Melcher (1982) found that those who had a high need for affiliation were more likely to accommodate than to compete. Chanin and Schneer (1984) reported more of a tendency to compromise or accommodate than to compete or collaborate among undergraduate seniors who were higher in feeling than in sensing, according to their scores on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
Figure 13.1 Reactions to Conflict
SOURCE: Adapted from Blake and Mouton (1964) and Thomas (1976).
Conflict and disagreement can be constructive, and when they are, they should be encouraged. Paraphrasing Caudron (1998, p. 48), “Instead of pulling out the weeds of conflict, leaders should nurture them. From the roots of conflict come the fruits of innovation.” Heifitz (1994) suggested that leaders need to confront followers with quandaries needing examination, clarification, and solution. The movement toward team efforts has generated the possibility of constructive disagreement with old ways of doing things instead of conformity to whatever was thought to be wanted by management. Out of the conflict have come new and better ways of doing things (Burke, 1970). Constructive leadership can attempt to find the reasons for a conflict, clarify the differences in a team, and indicate how much they are valued. It can convert a win-lose conflict to a win-win solution, encourage positive changes in attitudes to improve communications among team members, and focus attention on mutual goals.
Leaders face many conflicts. There are many sources of conflict that need the leaders’ attention. Role ambiguity and lack of a clear definition of a task are conducive to less job satisfaction and to reluctance to initiate action. Location in an organization predisposes leaders to engage in some conflicts more than others. Incongruities, discrepancies, and imbalances between roles, status, esteem, and competencies give rise to many of these conflicts. Emotional conflicts are harder to resolve than rational conflicts. The leadership role is subject to a variety of conflicting expectations, which may result in an inability to fulfill these expectations and may diminish the effects of the leader’s authority and responsibility in the formal organization. Conflicts arise within discordant roles, norms, and expectations. Within their roles, managers are faced with contradictory demands from superiors, peers, subordinates, and others. Multiple identifications by the managers are a way of coping with the resulting conflicts. Conflicts are also reduced or resolved by rational cause-effect analyses, by open discussion of the conflicts to convert negotiations into problem solving, or by more devious means.
Middle managers and first-line supervisors experience more role ambiguity than top managers. Workers are better satisfied and more productive when their supervisors are able to predict the reactions of their superiors. The failure of a superior to support supervisors decreases the supervisors’ self-esteem and also reduces their subordinates’ esteem of them. Disagreement between supervisors and their superiors about the roles of the supervisors results in greater anxiety and disagreement between the supervisors and their subordinates. Conflict can be constructive, but an important function of leaders is to reduce or resolve destructive conflict.
Conflict has been observed in business, industry, education, the military, and the public sector when a leader’s legitimacy is questioned. Legitimacy may be an outcome of a struggle for status or a matter of election or appointment. The basis of legitimacy will affect its acceptance by followers. Effective management and resolution of conflict can be brought about when authority, responsibility, and accountability are aligned.