The movement of conflict in organizations: the joint dynamics of splitting and triangulation

Administrative Science Quarterly,  March, 1989  by Kenwyn K. Smith

• E-mail
• Print
• Link

The Movement of Conflict in Organizations: The Joint Dynamics of Splitting and Triangulation

This paper examines the sociopsychological processes through which conflicts move around in organizations and become expressed at locations quite removed from their places of origin. This conceptualization draws on two major theoretical contributions: (1) "triangulation from social psychology and family therapy and (2) "splitting," as developed in anthropology and clinical psychology. With these sociopsychological processes linked, it is possible to understand how conflicts are transported from one location to another. These processes are illustrated with intensive case material from a long-term participant observation study of a public school system in which the relationships between the community, the elected board of education, the superintendent's office, the principals, teachers, and students in the high school were examined. A White House staff member of the Kennedy administration once commented that it was always clear when the president and the First Lady were fighting and when they were relating amicably. Responding to an expression of surprise that their relationship would be so transparent, the staff member replied, "they actually were quite private about their struggles, but we knew when they were fighting simply by watching the interactions of their personal staffs. When the hairdressers and the transport people were arguing we knew this was because JFK and Jackie were in conflict. When these groups had their act together we knew the first couple was getting on OK." This commentary contains a complex thesis about human behavior in organizations: conflicts "belonging" at one location are often displaced and enacted elsewhere, there being a parallelism between the conflicts at the place of origin and the place of expression. In this brief vignette from the Kennedy Administration we see the intergroup relations at the lowest level of the White House having enfolded into them the unresolved interpersonal conflicts at the highest level (Smith, 1984). The goal of this paper is to explicate a set of sociopsychological processes through which movement of such conflict in organizations may occur. Three preliminary considerations about the relocating of conflict set the frame for the theorizing in this paper. First, two settings may be connected in such a way that conflicts can be passed from one to the other, making it possible for all the tension to be released at one place on behalf of both parties. Or the two settings may swap them around so that each expresses the conflicts "belonging" to the other location. Second, conflicts can be moved from multiple locations, like tributaries feeding into a river, and become joined together, producing pressures that are released at a weak point, like the walls of a dam giving way or a river breaking its banks. The point where the conflicts are released can be understood as giving expression to all the tensions exported from elsewhere. Third, as conflict moves, it can both jump levels of the system and change form. In the Kennedy example, what started as interpersonal, marital tensions became an intergroup struggle over whose scheduling priorities were to prevail, the beauticians' or the limousine drivers'.

Setting the Frame