CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

306 GOLDMAN, CROPANZANO, STEIN, AND BENSON
mediator focuses on producing a climate that promotes problem-solving
dialogue between the parties. Finally, substantive interventions spotlight
the specific issues in the dispute. When using this strategy, the primary
goal of the mediator is to deal with the issues by some means.
In practice, mediators may espouse all three types of strategies to varying
extents. Indeed, researchers suggested that, many times, tactics are
used contingently depending on the mediators’ assessments of the dispute
(Lim & Carnevale, 1990). Specifically, they found that mediators thought
certain tactics were acceptable in some situations, but not in others. For
example, substantive/press tactics were negatively associated with settlement
under low levels of hostility but positively related under high levels
of hostility.
Managerial Intervention. The aforementioned tactics are common among
professional mediators due to the clear roles and defined limits that mediators,
arbitrators, and fact finders have in managing disputes (Elkouri &
Elkouri, 1979). Managers, on the other hand, have more flexibility to select
one or any combination of the previously mentioned strategies. Additionally,
managers often are not bound by the same constraints as are third
parties (Sheppard, Lewicki, & Minton, 1986). Moreover, due to the managers’
inherent closeness to the conflict, they may adopt a different set of dispute
resolution tactics than a detached third party. Formal or appointed
third parties are less likely to have a vested interest in the outcome of the
dispute. Managers, however, are often involved in the conflict and will
have to deal with the repercussions if the dispute is not resolved properly
(Lewicki & Sheppard, 1985). Indeed, research found that managers utilize
tactics that are distinct from the ones professional mediators employ to
resolve workplace conflict (Sheppard et al., 1987).
Just as Carnevale (1986) suggested several determinants of formal thirdparty
strategies, Pinkley, Neale, Brittain, and Northcraft (1995) examined
the relevant literature and extracted situational factors that they expected
to influence managerial selection: (a) dispute intervention goals of the
manager (Sheppard, 1983); (b) amount of conflict (Lewicki & Sheppard,
1985); (c) time constraints (Lewicki & Sheppard, 1985) and importance of
the issue (Carnevale & Conlon, 1988); (d) power balance and relationship
of the conflicting parties (Karambayya & Brett, 1989); and (e) hierarchical
positioning of third party (Heller, 1981).
In a related vein, we find a drawback that echoes throughout all of
the aforementioned studies. Specifically, the experimenters, and not the
managers, identified and categorized the situational factors posited to
affect managerial strategy selection. To deal with this problem in the tactic
research, Pinkley et al. (1995) used an inductive method that allowed
managers to identify, categorize, and label the conflict resolution tactics
that they used. Their use of multidimensional scaling provided a means
of detecting and quantitatively grouping the dispute resolution strategies
of managers, even when the managers were unable to conceptualize their