Give Peace a Chance? How Regulatory Foci Influence Organizational Conflict Events in Intractable Conflict Environments

Abstract

An intractable conflict environment (ICE) is an extreme context in which deep, unsolvable conflict between groups is central to the actors within it. While non-ICEs are typically assumed in organizational research, ICEs are increasingly common contexts for organizations. Moreover, this context influences peoples’ interpretation of potential organizational conflict incidents inside the organization and therefore the likelihood and emotional intensity of organizational conflict events. Whereas a potential conflict incident, such as a disagreement over how to complete a task, may be perceived as benign in a more typical environment, the same incident is more likely to be interpreted as much more negative and emotionally intense when taking place in an ICE, increasing the frequency of conflict events (conflictual behavior). Prior work suggests that, in a typical environment, promotion-framed (achieving positives) interventions reduce conflict more than prevention-framed (avoiding negatives) interventions by temporarily inducing promotion orientations that reduce the likelihood of interpreting conflict. However, we argue an ICE induces a strong prevention focus, which overrides promotion-framed interventions. Instead, we argue in an ICE, a prevention- rather than promotion-framed intervention is likely to be more effective because it “matches” the strong prevention focus. To test this prediction, we examine the difference in number of conflict events in farming cooperatives in rural Ghana (an ICE) after instituting prevention- versus promotion-framed interventions aimed at addressing conflict. Quantitative and qualitative findings from a 9-month field experiment support our hypothesis.