The Handbook of Conflict Resolution (3rd ed)

by Peter T Coleman

  One specific point of contention on Diana’s senior leadership team is that it did not unanimously agree on the creation of Leon’s position of director of diversity. Many felt that all members of the team “did diversity” and so did not think it necessary to add another director-level position. Yet Diana was swayed by Leon’s argument that he was already being pulled into that role anyway, as he was the “go-to-guy” whenever diversity issues came up in the organization. Several team members were quite critical of Leon, stating he was “narcissistic,” “slick,” and “pushing his own race agenda.” Diana acknowledged that Leon was a lightning rod on the team, noting that he was not liked or trusted by some team members, but she liked him and appreciated his skill and expertise.

  Since taking up his new role eighteen months ago, Leon worked with Alice and Pam to sponsor “affinity events” where African American women with breast cancer came together for information, support, and guidance in completing applications for Pink Power’s Stress Relief Fund. Affinity events are typically for one particular social identity group only (e.g., African American women); those of other social identities (e.g., white women) are not included. A few of the white women on the team were outspokenly against this. Several o were openly hostile to Leon about his initiatives, noting that Pink Power was renowned for its inclusiveness; they thought starting affinity groups and events would splinter the group irreparably. A number of the white women repeatedly stated that Pink Power already had a diversity group, Pink Rainbow, which was headed by a major donor to the organization and staffed by breast cancer survivors and other donors, staff, and volunteers. It is a diverse group in terms of members’ racial and cultural backgrounds. Pink Rainbow organized various diversity events to bring the work of Pink Power to diverse constituencies. Diana was supportive of the separate affinity events and thought they could coexist along with Pink Rainbow. She stated this publicly several times, but the bitter fight over Pink Rainbow versus affinity events continued on her team

  Angela noted that she comes from a family of immigrants and that she worked hard to get where she is. She thinks other people of color should do the same rather than benefit from special events or resources that others do not get. Alice said that as a Jewish American woman, she feels the same way. David is quietly supportive of the diversity efforts at Pink Power, including Leon and his work. Emily and Pam are new to the team. Each said she feels she has walked in on a conversation about diversity that started a long time ago, so it is difficult to get her bearings. Emily said she was confused by the concern about affinity events as they were conducted often at her last job (a similar one) with good results. Pam does not have much experience with affinity events but thinks they are a good idea for reaching new markets and new constituencies. She said that although she agrees with Leon, she finds it difficult to support him openly because he is seen as such a polarizing figure on the team.

  Indeed, several of the white women who had been at Pink Power for a long time said Leon was untrustworthy and accused him of jockeying for his next career move rather than focusing on what Pink Power really needed. Alice, in particular, was often at odds with Leon. The two seemed to strongly dislike each other, each criticizing the other frequently behind closed doors (albeit rarely directly). Several younger team members said they thought Alice was old-fashioned, and some even said they feared she wanted Pink Power to remain an organization that served white women only. Alice was brilliant at her job, however; her team routinely exceeded their quarterly fundraising goals. Several on the senior leadership team mentioned they thought it was difficult for Diana to give Alice frank feedback because the board loved Alice (and the money she brought in to the organization). Nina has a long history of doing diversity work in conjunction with HR in other jobs. She would like to put together some staff development workshops on diversity, racism, and white privilege for this team, but fears such trainings would be poorly received. Recently Nina overheard Alice say to Angela, “The last thing we need to spend our time on right now is white privilege!” Nina noted that the team is not going to get very far with its diversity efforts in the community until “we do our own work on diversity around the table.”

  TOWARD CONFLICT RESOLUTION: A GROUP RELATIONS MODEL OF INTERVENTION

  Wells’s five levels of organizational analysis (1995) can be applied to the senior leadership team of the Pink Power organization in order to understand some of the team’s destructive conflicts surrounding diversity and how to resolve them. The BART system can then be used across Wells’s five levels to formulate specific conflict resolution strategies for this team.

  Applying the Five Levels

  Level 1: Intrapersonal.

  When we use the first level of Wells’s model, the intrapersonal level of analysis, Leon is a source of this team’s conflict. His colleagues describe him negatively, and others on the team blame him as the major cause of much of the team’s struggle regarding how to approach diversity in the organization. For some, he is the cause of the conflict, and indeed, Leon is part of this team’s conflict. He has an intense personality that some experience as disingenuous and manipulative. It should be noted that others experience him as charming, compelling, and skilled. (More on this point later.) Leon is surely a provocative team member, due in part to who he is and how he takes up his work role. Yet given that others on the team also praise him, he is not the sole source of the conflict (as many of his colleagues believe). Removing Leon from the team would not make the conflict about diversity disappear. Therefore, it is helpful to examine other sources of the conflict at the other levels of analysis.

  Level 2: Interpersonal.

  Diana and several team members describe ongoing conflict between Leon and Alice. The two of them often heatedly argue in staff meetings, they do not support each other’s work, and they speak disparagingly of each other privately. Alice criticizes Leon’s diversity programs saying they are divisive and exclusionary, and she says that Leon loves “to play the race card.” Leon says Alice is a dinosaur when it comes to understanding diversity in organizations in the twenty-first century; he calls her ignorant and unskilled. The pair has a long history of dislike and distrust.

  Looking at the conflict in this team at the interpersonal level of analysis, one might conclude that Leon and Alice are the problem. They are two of the primary drivers of the destructive conflict because they refuse to work out their differences and will not collaborate in a constructive manner as team members. Indeed, in working with Leon and Alice, it is easy to see how they might dislike each other. They are very different in temperament. Leon is extroverted and speaks his mind freely and often. He is well versed in the latest trends in popular culture, loves to salsa dance, and sees blockbuster movies the day they open. Alice is introverted and measured when she speaks, dresses in modest, conservative clothing, and prefers quiet evenings at home to being in crowds at film openings.

  Leon and Alice also differ across a number of identity variables, including age, race, gender, political affiliation, religion, and socioeconomic status. It is not shocking that they would have conflicts. Yet some members of the team largely agree with Leon’s arguments, while others agree with Alice. The team members informally take sides and argue vehemently in defense of Leon or Alice. Therefore, while the conflict surely is in part between Leon and Alice, it is not solely between them but is also present in the larger group. Were it not, other group members would not so easily be able to identify with one or the other of them, nor would they be able to articulate their own position so strenuously in favor of one or the other. In fact, the other group members may be invested in positioning the conflict as only about Leon or located solely between Leon and Alice so as not to have to acknowledge their own role in it. That is, it serves the others on the team, albeit likely unconsciously, to insist the conflict is only intrapersonal or interpersonal instead of belonging to all of them.

  Level 3: Group as a Whole.

  Understanding the conflict at the group-
as-a-whole level of analysis means considering that the conflict exists in the entire senior leadership team at Pink Power and that Leon and Alice are both enacting destructive aspects of the conflict on behalf of the group as a whole. Both can be seen as potential scapegoats who are asked (unconsciously) to carry the team’s conflict so that other members do not have to. According to Wells (1995), Gemmil (1989), Horowitz (1985), and other group relations theorists (e.g., Taylor, Kurlioff, and Smith, 2004), group members are put forth (unconsciously) to represent unwanted aspects of group life, in particular, when there is significant anxiety present in the group. Some group members then become “serviceable others” (Morrison, 1992) to contain noxious, painful, or frightening feelings so that others in the group are freed from them. The extreme example of this is scapegoating. A scapegoat represents the badness (errors, failure) in a group and she or he is often sent away (isolated, fired) even though all members of the group are responsible for the group’s badness. Yet the scapegoat is made to carry the badness on behalf of the other group members.

  The Pink Power organization has not recovered from the newspaper article and subsequent social media attention suggesting it was unwelcoming to African American women. This event was discussed frequently at various levels of the organization, yet no clear strategic plan of how to address it was put forward. This caused significant anxiety in the group, and the senior leadership team was still reeling from this incident and its implications. The fear that Pink Power was perceived as a racist organization or even that it actually was one was never said explicitly, yet it remained an unspoken concern at team meetings when the topic was discussed.

  Examining the team’s conflict from the group-as-a-whole level of analysis means understanding Leon’s behavior and Leon and Alice’s interactions as a manifestation of the group’s conflict. This team was exceedingly anxious about how it “did diversity.” Leon was outspoken about the need to make changes in the organization in order to effectively engage the African American community. His communication style was commanding, and he exuded confidence about his ideas and beliefs. Indeed, at times, Leon seemed to suggest he was the only one who was skilled at diversity work in the entire organization. Other team members complained bitterly about Leon and his “race agenda.” He came to represent and voice the (feared) failure of the organization to be truly inclusive. Rather than using this conflict as an opportunity for the group to examine their own team’s diversity and its relationship to their organization’s perhaps outdated practices regarding diversity, the group members engaged in destructive conflict. Members disowned their own beliefs that Pink Power was potentially racist and asked Leon to carry them unknowingly on their behalf. They then hated him for it. So Leon was indeed a lightning rod, but he was also a talented fundraiser and a valued colleague. Clients adored him, and several of his colleagues on the leadership team said how lucky they were to have him as part of their staff given his expertise in both fundraising and diversity.

  Alice was also scapegoated. She was portrayed as a “dinosaur,” a living representation of the organization’s worst fears about what it had become: old, outdated, and out of touch. Some on the team said Alice needed to be fired given her inability to embrace new ideas about diversity, multiculturalism, and what inclusiveness means today. Yet Alice also received high praise from some in the organization. They noted she was warm, caring, and skilled as a fundraiser, and they felt she always put the clients first. Alice had been one of the first employees of the organization and was treasured by some as a member of the old guard and a living symbol of the organization’s history and tradition.

  This feedback about Leon and Alice suggests that neither he nor she is solely “the problem.” Rather they both have strengths and weaknesses like all other members of the team. Leon had been cast as “the problem” in this conflict, as had Alice to a lesser extent, when actually all members of the team were a part of it. Leon and Alice represented conflicts in the group that were covert, and helping the team members make these conflicts overt would enable them to see there are group root causes, not solely individual or interpersonal ones.

  Surfacing these conflicts at the group-as-a-whole level might be a difficult process for this team, although one that could potentially truly unstick them from their entrenchment. That is, helping the group examine their conflicts at the group level might enable them to work toward collaborative solutions. The group-as-a-whole framework includes the idea that group members are put forth to carry or represent unwanted or undesirable feelings or qualities that others want to disown. Therefore, scapegoating Leon, Alice, or the two of them as a pair served a purpose for the other team members, although they might not be fully aware of it. At the group-as-a-whole level of analysis, Leon contains all the self-interest on behalf of the group. That is, he is seen as pushing his own agenda so that others are seen as not self-interested but only as advocates for the good of the group. Alice is cast as the dinosaur so the others on the team are free to be young and cutting edge. By not addressing the group issues, the team members leave them stuck in Leon, Alice, and in Leon and Alice’s pair.

  Level 4: Intergroup.

  Leon and Alice’s interactions can be understood at the intergroup level of analysis as a representation of a conflict not just between the two of them (interpersonal level), but also between their respective informal subgroups. Their conflict can be seen as between the new guard of younger staff recently hired by the organization whose understanding of multiculturalism and diversity is very different from that of the old guard, the veteran advocates who started the organization in the 1980s after working actively in the feminist movement over the previous decade. It is a conflict about who owns the organization and who gets to decide its constituencies: the old or the new. The old felt pushed out of the conversation on diversity at times, while the new felt the old was unskilled in multiculturalism. The new failed to take into account the critical importance of the organization’s history and traditions as inclusive and egalitarian and instead wanted to jump to new ways of working with diversity without acknowledging or accounting for the organizational culture around such issues. The old failed to consider that what diversity and inclusiveness mean now may be different from what it meant in the 1980s.

  This generational conflict then was not only about age differences, but also about the organization’s future and mortality. This vantage point sheds more light on why the conflict about affinity events was so entrenched. The conflict was not just about whether the organization should hold affinity events. Were that the case, it would likely have been resolved more expediently. Rather, when viewed at the intergroup level, affinity events represented a conflict about the organization’s future. These events stirred up questions about leadership succession and symbolized a concern about the organization’s mortality and sustainability. Would Pink Power be able to adapt with the times in order to thrive in its current environment? To do so, did Pink Power have to disempower, silence, or eliminate the old guard? The conflict between Leon and Alice was between them certainly, but it was also representative of deeper, painful, critical conflicts between subgroups in the larger senior leadership team.

  Level 5: Interorganizational.

  Finally, the team’s conflicts could be seen as a manifestation of larger organizational issues. Examining the conflict from Wells’s fifth level of analysis means looking at how this team’s infighting about diversity at their organization reflects larger issues in the breast cancer advocacy community regarding these same topics.

  Broadly speaking, breast cancer advocacy organizations want to be seen as inclusive of all women (and sometimes men), and that means having a community of staff and clients reflecting the demographics of who gets breast cancer. It also means having policies that promote diversity and inclusion, as well as an organizational climate that does the same. Yet how to do this exactly is not always clear and is often challenging. The interorganizational level of analysis focuses on how the conflict in t
he group is related to these larger systemic issues. Therefore, it is not just about Leon, or Leon and Alice, or the senior leadership team, or the older and younger generations, but also the entire organization and how it is relating to its larger environmental context: the breast cancer advocacy organization community, the breast cancer research community, the US health care system, and so on. Recognizing these conflicts as opportunities for the organization to grow and change rather than as permanent fissures among group members could help shift the conflicts to being constructive rather than destructive.

  Wells’s Framework for Understanding Conflict

  Wells’s levels of organizational analysis provide a framework for understanding conflict in groups at multiple points of entry. Wells emphasized that in any group or system, there are dynamics that occur at each level continuously. That means there are rarely dynamics solely at the intrapersonal level or solely at the interpersonal level and so on. Rather, processes occur at each level at any given time. One may notice, attend to, or intervene at a select level or levels based on a variety of factors. The level where one intervenes in a group conflict is related to what one has been asked to do, who one has access to, as well as how sophisticated and capable an organization is to look at itself at multiple levels. Sometimes psychological sophistication is built into an organization’s culture whereby employees and team members are used to thinking about themselves critically and working on organization development from a systemic perspective. Other organizations have cultures that de-emphasize psychological inquiry and organization development and would be less capable at looking at group conflict across various levels of analysis, at least at the outset. It is sometimes possible to do a phased approach where one addresses the group’s presenting problem first and over time is allowed to work more deeply with the group on the more emotionally laden, values-based issues that reverberate systemically.