Understanding Conflict

Schools generate conflict daily. Teachers disagree with each other. Parents complain about teachers. Students fight. Staff resent management decisions. The principal cannot eliminate conflict; she can only manage it. Effective conflict management does not suppress conflict; it converts destructive conflict into productive engagement.

What conflict management is

Rahim (2002) defines conflict management as the process of limiting the negative aspects of conflict while increasing the positive aspects. It aims to improve group outcomes, including performance in organisational settings.

Two important points.

1. Conflict has positive and negative aspects. It is not all bad. Some conflict produces better outcomes than no conflict would.
2. The goal is management, not elimination. A school without conflict is either unusually peaceful or actively suppressing disagreement. Suppression is rarely sustainable.

What conflict is

A working definition: a situation that arises when one party perceives that another party has negatively affected, or is about to negatively affect, something the first party cares about.

The key word is “perceives”. Conflict is in the perception, not necessarily in the reality. Two teachers may have a genuine disagreement; one may have perceived a slight that was not intended; one may have manufactured a grievance from nothing. All three count as conflict because the perception drives the behaviour.

Conflict can also originate from past rivalries and personality differences. It is a disagreement in which the parties perceive a threat to their needs, interests, concerns, or interpretations. Two senior teachers who clashed three years ago often bring that history into every current interaction. The current conflict may be about a curriculum decision; the underlying conflict is the older one.

Two main forms of conflict

Substantive conflict and emotional conflict are the two main forms.

Substantive conflict is dissent over goals, resources, rewards, policies, procedures, and job assignments. It is about real differences in interest, opinion, or position. Two teachers disagree about which textbook to use. The principal and the board disagree about the fee structure. A parent disagrees with the school about discipline.

Substantive conflict can be productive. Working through it tends to produce better decisions. The disagreement surfaces information that consensus would have hidden.

Emotional conflict is the set of feelings around anger, distrust, dislike, fear, and resentment, as well as relationship problems. Two staff members dislike each other personally. A teacher feels disrespected by the principal. A parent has lost trust in the school.

Emotional conflict tends to be destructive. Working through it requires repair work that goes beyond the immediate issue.

Why the distinction matters

Conflicts often mix substantive and emotional elements. The immediate disagreement may be substantive; the energy behind it may be emotional.

A school head who treats every conflict as substantive misses the emotional dimension. The conflict gets “resolved” on the substance but festers underneath because the emotion was not addressed.

A school head who treats every conflict as emotional misses the substance. The relationship may be repaired but the underlying issue is not resolved; it reappears in the next conflict.

Good conflict management addresses both dimensions. The substantive issue gets resolved. The emotional residue gets attended to.

Conflict as threat

A conflict is more than a mere disagreement. It is a situation in which people perceive a threat (physical, emotional, power, status, belief system) to their well-being. It is a meaningful experience in people’s lives, not to be taken lightly.

A conflict is not a debate. It is a perceived threat. The person in conflict feels something important to her is at risk. This is why conflict often produces strong emotion and resistant behaviour: she is defending what matters.

The threats can be:

1. Physical. Rare in a school but possible (a staff member feels physically unsafe).
2. Emotional. Common (a teacher feels her dignity is at stake).
3. Power. Common (a coordinator feels her authority is being undermined).
4. Status. Common (a senior teacher feels her standing is being eroded).
5. Belief system. Sometimes (a teacher’s pedagogical values feel under attack).

A school head trying to manage conflict should ask: what is the person in conflict feeling threatened by? The answer often reveals what is really going on, beneath the surface issue.

The dimensions of conflict

As in any problem, conflicts contain substantive, procedural, and psychological dimensions to be negotiated. To best understand the threat perceived by those engaged in a conflict, consider all three dimensions.

Three dimensions in any real conflict.

1. Substantive. The actual issue at stake.
2. Procedural. How the disagreement is being handled.
3. Psychological. The emotional and identity stakes for the participants.

Many conflicts that look like substantive disagreements are really about procedure or psychology. A parent complaining about a teacher’s marking may be substantively right about the marking, but the underlying issue may be that she felt unheard in previous interactions (procedural) or that her child’s success is tied to her own identity (psychological).

A school head who attends to only the substantive dimension solves part of the conflict and leaves the rest. A school head who attends to all three dimensions resolves the conflict more durably.

Conflict as a personal experience

Participants’ responses are usually based on their perceptions of the situation rather than an objective review of it. People filter their perceptions and reactions through their values, culture, beliefs, information, gender, experience, and other variables.

Conflict is filtered through who the person is. The same event tends to produce different conflicts in different people because they perceive it differently.

This has practical implications.

1. Listen for the perception, not just the facts. A teacher’s account of a conflict may not match the principal’s view. Both views are real to the person holding them.
2. Acknowledge before resolving. The person in conflict needs to feel heard before she can engage with resolution.
3. Do not insist on objective truth. In many conflicts, there is no purely objective truth. There are perceptions to be acknowledged and ways forward to be found.

A school head trained in “let me lay out the facts” can be frustrated by conflicts that do not yield to facts. The conflicts that yield to facts are usually small; the difficult ones require working with perceptions.

Conflict as part of normal life

Conflicts are normal experiences in the work environment. They are largely predictable situations that arise naturally as people manage complex and stressful projects together.

Conflict is not a failure of management. It is a feature of working with people. A school head who feels her school has failed because conflict exists has misunderstood. The question is not whether conflict exists; it is how it is managed.

When the school develops procedures for identifying conflicts likely to arise, and systems for constructively managing them, conflict can be transformed into a productive learning experience.

The aim is to convert destructive conflict into productive engagement. Conflict that surfaces real differences and gets worked through tends to produce better decisions, stronger relationships, and a more capable team. Creative problem-solving is central. The shift is from “my way or the highway” to finding new possibilities that were not visible before.

Flashcard

What is conflict, and what are its three dimensions?

Tap to reveal

Answer

Conflict is a perceived threat to something a person cares about; it has substantive, procedural, and psychological dimensions.

Two main forms:

1. Substantive conflict. Real differences over goals, resources, policies, procedures, assignments. Can be productive.

2. Emotional conflict. Feelings of anger, distrust, dislike, fear, resentment. Usually destructive; requires repair work.

Three dimensions in any real conflict:

1. Substantive. The actual issue.
2. Procedural. How the disagreement is being handled.
3. Psychological. The emotional and identity stakes.

A school head should attend to all three. Many conflicts that look substantive are actually procedural or psychological at root. Treating the surface issue without the underlying dimensions leaves the conflict unresolved.