Interfering with Ill Will

If they want to… That seems to be the key.

Although all supervisors must make tough decisions, not all supervisors find themselves fighting savage battles with angry people out for revenge. Something interferes with and disperses these feelings for some people. So how does this work? Is it luck, or is it something some supervisors do . . . some tactics the rest of us could learn and use to our advantage?

Sim Sikin of the University of Texas and Robert Bies of Georgetown University in Washington reviewed all the recent research involving conflict in the workplace and discovered a tactic some supervisors use which short circuits developing conflict. It is a verbal tactic. They called managerial justifications.

Conflict, they explained, evolves in a three-step process:

Naming – the first step involves one party identifying an experience as being harmful, or potentially harmful. It may involve some concern which he/she feels has been frustrated, or it may be only a threat to this concern. It may also involve competition for scarce resources, or simply conflicting values.

Blaming – once naming has occurred, the injured party seeks to assign blame to another person.

Claiming (as in file a lawsuit) – When harm is recognized and a responsible party has been identified, the injured party must assess the motives of the responsible party, claim damages he/she feels are owed, and set out on a course of action to satisfy his/her claim.

In business and organizational settings, satisfying damage claims can involve vengeful acts of sabotage and/or disrupting business. It can also take passive forms of resistance, which finds people holding their positions, but not really fulfilling functions we expect from those jobs (essentially, holding their jobs hostage). We may even find ourselves in court.

Managerial justifications disrupt this 3-stage process. They disrupt a person's perception of a) who is responsible for the harmful experience, b) the motives of this person, and c) the extent of damage the experience caused. Following are some categories of managerial justifications Sikin and Bies identified from the research literature that supervisors can use to shape peoples' perceptions and prevent conflict.

By explaining that a harmful action was taken because you had no choice, supervisors frustrate the blame step. They alter the perception of how the injury was caused. Several researchers have demonstrated dramatic decreases in vengeful, retaliatory acts such as stealing from the company, when mitigating explanations such as these are offered for experiences supervisors acknowledge as being harmful.

By explaining that a harmful effect was the unfortunate byproduct of a larger, important effort, supervisors also frustrate the blame step. In one business simulation experiment, they describe how victims who had been deceived were much less likely to retaliate against the person who deceived them if they had been given such a mitigating explanation. Emphasising shared goals, such as remaining competitive, also falls in this category (stick together to defeat a common enemy).

By explaining that you are human and fallible, you can acknowledge the harmful experience and also frustrate the blame step. Everyone is human, and injured people are slow to anger when the responsible party is just like them, unable to achieve perfect outcomes with everything they do.

By changing the name the harmed party assigns to the harmful experience, supervisors can disrupt the naming step. For example, describing a hardship by referring to others who have suffered greater losses: "our budget cut back is 50% of the average cut back for everyone else." This justification shapes how people think about the harm they have suffered. It also carries a veiled threat: it could be worse for you.

By changing the timeframe, supervisors can also disrupt the naming step. This justification finds supervisors calling attention to broad time spans to describe current hardships in more positive terms: this is probably our last bad year, next year looks much brighter.

Justifications must meet several criteria or they won't successfully interfere with people's ill will in hostile situations. They must be perceived as adequate, they must be logical, and they must be sincerely delivered. Supervisors must appear genuine and honest.

The best justifications have proven to be ones which referred to company rules, budget constraints, and/or expected norms of behavior for the company. The worst justifications have proven to be ones which blame the misfortune on the harmed parties' own behavior, upper management, and/or the political environment.

Supervisors who are skilled at offering justifications don't rely upon just one or two of them. They offer an average of 4.4 justifications for each action they feel needs such an explanation. By doing so, they cover all the bases. They recognize that many people are affected by actions they take and that justifications which work well with one group may not work well with another group. Multiple explanations satisfy everyone.

Multiple justifications also overwhelmed people's capacity to evaluate their validity. Being unable to evaluate all of them, injured parties must fall back on the sincerity of the supervisor. If this meets their threshold for honesty, then they rely upon faith in the supervisor and accept the harmful experience as unavoidable bad luck and then dismiss the incident.

Research on timing of justifications shows that the sooner they are offered, the better. The best results came with explanations which preceded the negative act – forewarnings with justification for why something harmful might happen.

Managerial justifications also help injured parties save face. Supervisors show respect for people when they offer unrequired explanations, and this fosters attitudes of trustworthiness and legitimacy.

But there is also a danger in using justifications.

When Supervisors get too good at this tactic, they may fall back upon it in place of taking effective action. This may lead to problems remaining hidden and ignored, to an illusion of completeness in decision-making that masks a weak process (mistakes aren't discovered, discussions are cut off, expertise is not utilized). And everyone may come to expect explanations and feel betrayed if they aren't forthcoming for every minor inconvenience they suffer. This may eventually lead to feelings of distrust.

But the bottom line is that justifications work splendidly to disrupt hard feelings and conflict, and that's why supervisors who use them have such calm, hard-working employees.

Imagine a volcano dangerously building pressure with a valve somewhere on the mountain side one could open which would prevent a disastrous explosion. Wouldn't it be a useful bit of knowledge to know where that valve was and how to open it? Managerial justifications are like that . . . they're safety valves which prevent explosions of destructive passions.

Supervisors in all settings need to know how to interfere with ill will, and managerial justifications seem to be the answer. After all, exploding volcanoes of conflict just aren't good for business.

Reference: Sikin, Sim and Robert Bies (1993) Social accounts in conflict situations: Using explanations to manage conflict. Human Relations, 46(3) 349–369.