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Conflict cultures at multiple levels
Individual, organization and culture scholars have called for more conflict research to consider organizational norms. Ting-Toomey and Oetzel (2013) created the Updated Culture-Based Social Ecological Conflict Model (UCBSECM) and urged scholars to consider more meso level (e.g. workplace norms) and exo level (e.g. institutional policies) constructs when studying conflict (Table 1). The updated model was created because the original one [CBSCM (Ting-Toomey and Oetzel, 2001)] focused exclusively on microlevel (e.g. face concerns) and macrolevel (e.g. collectivism) cultural constructs. In addition, Ramirez-Marin et al. (2019) proposed an agenda for researching cultural norms in communication, negotiation and conflict management. They highlighted an important conceptual and practical distinction between injunctive norms – what most people approve of – and descriptive norms – what most people do – because individuals’ ideals do not necessarily match observable behaviors.
This project aims to address both these calls by studying organizational conflict cultures. Because they are “a socially shared and normative way to manage conflict […] which ultimately minimize individual variation in conflict management strategies” (Gelfand et al., 2008, p. 140), conflict cultures are a meso level construct and, therefore, address Ting-Toomey and Oetzel’s call for studying socio-ecological layers between micro and macro levels. To addresses Ramirez-Marin et al.’s call to identify both injunctive and descriptive conflict norms, we differentiate ideal conflict cultures, the norms approved by organizational members, from perceived conflict cultures, organizational members’ perceptions of the most typical workplace conflict behaviors.
This project also aims to situate conflict cultures in relation to micro and macrolevel cultural variables typically associated with individual conflict behaviors. One study found that managers in Hong Kong China idealized and demonstrated more collective conflict norms than managers is the USA which resulted in different conflict management outcomes (Tinsley and Brett, 2001). In a study of US American professors, ideal conflict cultures varied very little (Desrayaud, 2022) suggesting a consistent and strongly held injunctive norm, potentially stemming from cultural influences such as the individualism and self-face concern common in academia and the USA (Trumbull et al., 2020). To test this possibility, we explore some of the most commonly used cultural variables in conflict research: collectivism and face concerns.
Conflict cultures
The theory of conflict cultures proposes that organizations create...