University Times

Studies of workplace violence show that extreme incidents such as assaults or murders don’t just happen. “They start at low levels of incivil behavior that begins to spiral and escalate,” said business faculty member Ray Jones.

“It doesn’t start with somebody walking in one day with a gun, or coming in and randomly punching somebody. When you look at it, you can always can go back and see the spiral occurred: There were some intense arguments that probably led to profanity, led to some shoving, led to some lower-level forms of incivility that got out of control.”

It’s important for managers to recognize that conflict isn’t necessarily bad, but it is inevitable and needs to be dealt with proactively. “If we allow conflicts to boil and then to escalate, it creates the conditions in which things will continue to spiral and things will continue to be dysfunctional,” Jones said.

“It makes the case for why we should pay attention to civility.”

Jones, one of the business school faculty who lead workshops for faculty and staff in the University’s certificate in organizational leadership and ethics (COLE) program, recently updated the session “Ethical Leadership Within Hyper-Competitive Workplaces” to focus more on helping managers understand workplace interactions and how to deal positively with conflict.

He discussed the content of the new workshop, “Managing Incivility and the Bystander Effect in the Workplace,” after its debut last month.

“It’s much more a managerial focus than a research-on-civility-and-violence focus,” Jones said. “It’s really hard to get people to talk about where they’ve seen civility and incivility in the workplace because it’s a sensitive topic,” he said. “If the frame is just civility, it’s too heavy. And it’s too heavy to get people to participate.”

More effective is to start the discussion with building relationships, then to move on to talk about managing conflict and fostering civility.

“If relationships are important and we realize that conflict occurs, the job of the manager is to understand conflict and manage conflict in ways that are constructive for the organization. That’s a good mindset to get into,” Jones said.

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“How much conflict and violence you experience is a function of the type of job you have,” said Jones. Unlike police officers, corrections workers or even taxi drivers, bartenders or convenience store workers, when it comes to the risk of workplace violence, “the safest job in America is being a college professor,” quipped Jones. “That makes a lot of sense because think of what you do every day and the people you’re in front of.”

While not overtly risky, other University jobs have higher potential for conflict — residence hall staff who deal with students around the clock, for instance. “I see them at 2 in the afternoon, they see them at 2 in the morning,” Jones said.

IT workers, who must deal regularly with upset clients frustrated by computer problems, or financial aid workers who don’t always have good news to deliver, are other examples. “If your job is to tell people on a regular basis ‘You’re not receiving aid,’ you’re going to have a much higher level of conflict than a colleague who works in a back office,” Jones said.

“It’s important to figure out how we can help support people when they have to go in and do difficult and challenging things like that,” he said. “These are people who have to deal with conflict on a regular basis; they have relationships from all over the place. There’s a value to understanding issues of civility in managing conflict effectively.”

The power of connections

It’s easy to find practical examples for why relationships are important and what can be accomplished by developing them, Jones said.

The “maven” and “connector” personality types described in Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” are apt.

“Connectors are people who enjoy building relationships, networking and socializing with people,” Jones said. “When you are aware of the connectors in your network, it allows you to figure out how you can gain access to new opportunities and new perspectives. And it allows you to get it and find different connections — whether it’s an idea you want to explore or a market you want to go into.”

Mavens — who have deep expertise — are important contacts to cultivate, too. In the workshop, Jones said, “I mentioned that I needed my air conditioning fixed and seven people raised their hands to say they had someone. You can do that with anything.”

He also named three locations — Denmark, Nigeria, Iceland. “Somebody knew somebody from there, within our room of 50 people.”

Being aware of the power of connections is more than a theoretical topic. “It’s actually an opportunity for action,” he said.

For managers, “If you have something specific you’re trying to do — in an area of expertise or different locations — there are probably people on your team who have connections there already,” he said.

Conflict

“Relationships are important. They can make things happen, to mobilize and get things done. But the challenge of being a manager is that you have to deal with conflict,” Jones said.

Initial management research on conflict that emerged in the early 20th century — the era of two world wars — viewed conflict as destructive, something to be avoided, Jones said. Later research, colored by counterculture movements of the 1960s, embraced conflict as natural and inevitable.

Today’s more balanced approach differentiates between dysfunctional conflict, which creates distractions, waste or inefficiency and  does not support the goals of the group, and functional conflict, which can be a source of progress and change.

“The way that we approach conflict should be driven by not just solving the conflict or rationalizing or embracing the conflict. It should be done in a way that’s functional,” Jones said. “It should be resolved in a way that’s consistent with the goals of the organization, or maybe even improves the way things are done within the organization.”

Given that conflict is inevitable — and often dysfunctional — one of the best things managers can do is to understand their team members’  — and their own — conflict management styles, Jones said, citing work done in the 1970s by then-Pitt business faculty member Ralph Kilmann.

Kilmann collaborated on identifying five basic styles: collaborating, accommodating, compromising, avoidant and competitive, each of which has pluses and minuses.

Competitors, for instance, “can get intense, and even negative or volatile,” Jones noted. The manager of this kind of employee may need to “take a proactive approach and crank him down,” Jones said.  Managers of conflict-avoidant individuals, on the other hand, need to consider “how do you get them to step up and actually address the conflict?”

Competence and likability

Another way to view team interactions is in terms of an individual’s competence and likability. “If you are perceived as high in likability and high in competence, you are a ‘lovable star,’ which means people seek out ways to work with you. Not only are you really good at what you do, but you’re really nice and a team player and great to have around,” Jones said, citing research published in the Harvard Business Review.

“Sometimes people like that get overwhelmed because everyone wants to get around them,” he said.

At the other end of the spectrum is the “incompetent jerk,” who likely is at risk for being fired. “You’re probably not long for the place if you’re low in competence and low in likability among your peers,” Jones said.

More interesting are the remaining two categories: “competent jerks” who, although difficult, have crucial expertise; and “lovable fools,” who may not be competent but who are pleasant to be around.

“When given the choice between a competent jerk and a lovable fool, people almost always choose to work with a lovable fool over a competent jerk,” the research showed. “It’s painful to deal with the jerks,” Jones said.

“It gets you to think about civility and the value of civility in the workplace.”

—Kimberly K. Barlow