Making Conflict Work Quotes

“Exercising good judgment and employing power so that it is appropriate in type and magnitude to the situation are key factors for wielding effective power.16 They will also directly impact the very foundations for conflict at work, your emotional reservoirs.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Primary power refers to the ability to affect those basic activities (such as laws, ideology, morality, symbolism, the media, policies, agendas, and decision-making processes) that shape the playing field. Secondary power involves the many strategies and tactics used while playing on the field to influence others.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“This distinction translates easily to conflict in the workplace. At work, formal authority and the power to hire and fire, reward and punish, and even threaten and humiliate others are typical forms of hard power employed in negotiations and conflict. Alternatively, developing a reputation as the go-to problem solver or an IT wiz or as having high emotional intelligence, compassion, or a clear moral compass can give you a lot of soft power.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Finally, there is the often-dreaded and rarely cited approach of power under. This is an approach to power that involves obtaining assistance and support from others, often through a dependence relationship.10 In chapters 5 and 7, on support and appeasement, we outline a variety of tactics used by lower-power parties for “borrowing” power.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“extreme, power with can lead to inefficiencies, irresponsible leadership practices, chronic consensus seeking, and nepotism at work.6”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“The power-with approach in organizations has its own pathologies and detractors. An overreliance on power with can result in what hard-liners call a well-intentioned pipe dream: an idealistic vision of something ultimately unattainable. Given the ruthless jungle of the marketplace and of most organizational environments, they argue, the possibilities for mutual enhancement through cooperative power are limited.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Research on cooperation and power has largely supported Follett’s thinking. Researchers have found that when managers and employees view their tasks, rewards, and outcome goals as shared or cooperative, it increases the likelihood of the constructive use of power between higher- and lower-power persons.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Power with is based on an incrementalist theory, which views power as an expandable resource that can bring about constructive and satisfying outcomes for all. It tends to motivate people to search out one another’s abilities and competencies and to encourage and appreciate their contributions, and to exchange resources that will help both parties be more productive.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“employing a predominantly controlling approach to power at work can have negative consequences. It can produce alienation and resistance in those subjected to it. This, in turn, can limit your ability to use other types of power that are based on trust and increase the need for continuous scrutiny and regulation of subordinates. If your goal is to achieve compliance and commitment to the job from your subordinates, then sole reliance on a power-over strategy will prove costly.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Understanding power over is immensely important. Managers need to be able to maintain a reasonable degree of order and efficiency at work, and coercive power can be a necessary or practical tool when you find yourself in a conflict with unjust or unresponsive others or in situations where subordinates are hostile or unmotivated to comply with reasonable demands.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Power is everywhere, waiting to be identified, created, and mobilized.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“The sources, types, and means of power are as infinite as our imagination.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“being mindful of these different assumptions and theories can help control or enhance them.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“The more you hold a fixed-pie theory of power, the more likely you are to take a competitive approach to power politics and conflict. The more you hold an incrementalist theory, the more likely you are to empower your peers and supervisees whenever possible and share your power and resources. You’ll be more likely to try a more cooperative, win-win approach when appropriate.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“some managers view power unconsciously as something that can be grown and increased in cooperation with others. They believe that by working together with their employees they can all gain more power and influence. This more cooperative and incremental theory of power, called an incrementalist theory, has been found in our research to be associated with managers who are more likely to share power and information with employees and support employee empowerment initiatives.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“If I delegate authority to you, I lose some power and control. This fixed-pie theory has been found in our research to automatically set up a competition for power between supervisors and employees (and even more so between peers). This win-lose perspective leads to more politicking, power hoarding, and a reliance on strategies of domination in conflict, which increase the need for constant scrutiny and control of subordinates.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“major factor in interpersonal relations and performance at work are the implicit theories we hold about abstract things like leadership, followership, intelligence, and power.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Can you veto or obstruct my goals and desires? Can you help me achieve them or prevent me from harm, and can I, in turn, do the same for you?”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“In conflicts, relative power is key: our ability, relative to the ability of the other stakeholders, to cause or prevent things from happening.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“better understand, cultivate, and more effectively leverage power for constructive conflict management.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“The effects of power on conflict management and of conflict on power dynamics have been largely neglected and marginalized in both the scholarship on conflict and especially in the practice and training side of conflict management. This gap is glaring given the fact that the vast majority of conflicts happen between people and groups with differences in power, authority, and status.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Probably the number-one thing that aggravates and complicates conflict dynamics at work is power. Having it, not having it, hoarding it, sharing too much of it, bestowing it, abusing it, fighting it, channeling it, enhancing access to it by others, or wielding it over them.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Crude Law of Social Relations”—that cooperative conflict engenders more cooperation in the future, and competitive conflict, more competition.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Conflicts, even trivial ones, tend to have a lasting impact on us. They affect how we feel about ourselves, how we feel about the others involved, and how we feel about the place in which the conflict occurred. They are formative.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“You may also need to move a conflict from high intensity to lower intensity so that threat, fear, anxiety, and impulsive reactions recede and a sense of possibility, hope, and reason returns. This often begins with space: allowing yourself and the disputants some time and space away from the demands of the conflict in order to regroup.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“It also requires capacity for other-orientation and respectful inquiry, so that the disputants might better gauge the underlying concerns of the others involved and learn why they may wish to keep them hidden.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“This might entail moving the conflict from covert to overt, so that you and the other disputants can better understand it and perhaps identify areas of misunderstanding, common ground, or possible compromise. This requires the capacity for self-reflection and contemplation, so that the disputants can gain a better sense of what is at stake, what their priorities are, and why”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Since conflicts that are low intensity, cooperative, and overt tend to be much easier to manage and more likely to result in positive outcomes than those that are high intensity, competitive, and covert, our most basic goals should be to better understand how to keep conflicts from moving in the latter direction and how to defuse the ones that do.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Conflict Transparency: This is essentially the degree to which a conflict is explicit or openly expressed. A lack of transparency in personal relationships and professional transactions is often a source of conflict. Generally, the more transparent or explicit a conflict, the easier it is to address constructively through discussion, negotiation, and mediation.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement

“Conflict Structure: This refers to the actual, objective goals associated with a conflict (not how they are perceived). Conflicts can range from consisting of purely cooperative, win-win (also known as integrative) goals, where the disputants share the same underlying concerns, to those with purely competitive, win-lose (also known as zero-sum) goals, where the only way for Disputant A to achieve his or her goals is for Disputant B to lose.”
― Peter T. Coleman, Making Conflict Work: Harnessing the Power of Disagreement