Interpersonal Conflict at Work: An Analysis of Behavioral Responses

Abstract

Interest and research in interpersonal conflict has led to the development of a number of instruments for measuring conflict style. These instruments lack the more demonstrative responses that sometimes occur during interpersonal conflict, and each determines conflict style through abstract measures. Two hundred and sixty-three participants were asked to describe one conflict that they were involved in at work. Given a list of 21 conflict responses, participants were asked to (1) rank-order the responses in the order in which they actually responded to the conflict, (2) identify the responses they were currently using, (3) identify those responses they had not used but might, and (4) identify those responses they would never use. The results indicate some well-defined clusters of responses, including an emotive category.