Ronda Roberts Callister

Conflict and Its Management

This article reviews the conflict literature, first examining the causes of conflict, its core process, and its effects. Subsequently, we probe into conflict escalation (and de-escalation), contexts, and conflict management. When examining this last topic, we note that conflict can be managed by the disputants themselves, by managers, or by other third parties. In conclusion we suggest directions for future research and provide recommendations for practicing managers.

Anger in Organizations: Review and Integration

Organizations are rife with situations likely to cause employee anger, including complex relationships, chronic pressure, high stakes, and factors beyond individual control. The importance of this discrete emotion has led to a range of studies exploring the implications of anger for critical organizational phenomena, including emotion norms, leadership, gender issues, status and power, and cross-cultural differences. Despite the dramatic increase in scholarly attention over the past decade to understanding anger experience and expression in organizations, there exist few current reviews and little integration of this diverse literature. By combining a psychological perspective of anger as an episodic process with an organizational perspective emphasizing contextual effects and norms, this review will summarize current research in this vital area, provide a model for understanding and integrating this work, and propose themes for future research.

Feedback Seeking Following Career Transitions

We examined how inquiring and monitoring for feedback from peers and supervisors changed over time for transferees. Hypotheses were grounded in uncertainty reduction and impression management theor...

Information-Receiving and Information-Giving During Job Transitions

Based on social exchange theory, this research develops a typology of six strategies for exchanging information. This study explored the information‐receiving and information‐giving of both newcomers and transferred employees involved in job transitions in one organization. Results suggest that unsolicited information‐receiving is positively related to job satisfaction and organizational knowledge, in addition to being negatively related to intention to quit, and that information‐giving through modeling is also negatively associated with intention to quit. Results also indicate that transferred employees are more knowledgeable of the organization and their roles, as well as, more likely to model consciously appropriate behaviors than newcomers. Conversely, newcomers are more likely to use observations to gain information than transferees.

Malaysian Community Mediation

This study investigates the mediations of 127 village leaders (ketua kampungs) and 52 religious leaders (imams) in Malaysia. These mediators rely heavily on techniques of meeting with disputants (separately and together), listening to the disputants side, information gathering, and calling for concessions. They also use three distinct strategies: a “meet separately” strategy, an assertive strategy, and a strategy based on information gathering. The imams rely more on prayer, moral principles, listening, and third-party advice and call less often for concessions. Imams use a unique “meet together” strategy and prayer strategy.

Undergraduate Management Skills Courses and Students' Emotional Intelligence

In this paper, we draw parallels between teaching undergraduate management skills and the emotional intelligence movement: both address the need for personal and interpersonal skills to help one succeed in work and in life, both identify a comprehensive set of skills which can be learned by adults, and both identify various reflective and self-monitoring techniques to learn and teach these skills. Using a pre-test/post-test experimental design, we provide evidence that current methods of teaching management skills to undergraduates also build emotional intelligence. Results of our study show that 121 students taking an undergraduate management skills course significantly improved their emotional intelligence scores during a 16 week semester, while a control group of 113 students taking other business courses did not. We discuss the implications of our results and call for more research and discussion about undergraduate management skill courses and emotional intelligence.

Japanese Community and Organizational Mediation

This study investigated community and organizational mediation in Japan. Initially, hypotheses about community mediation were developed from a review of Japanese history and culture. These predictions were compared to data from interviews with Japanese students and subsequently with data collected in Japan. The comparisons yielded revised predictions about organizational conflict resolution, which were strongly supported by data collected in Japan. Specifically, it was found that the Japanese in their organizations, as in the community, infrequently use assertive mediation techniques such as criticism, education, and disputant separation. They are more apt to rely on nonassertive techniques such as gathering information from the disputants, listening to opinions, and relaying these between disputants. Such an approach is significantly less assertive than that used by the Chinese or the South Koreans.

Thai and U.S. Community Mediation.

The approaches of 111 Thai and a matched set of 111 U.S. community mediators are investigated. Results show that Thai mediators are more apt to be assertive in their mediations; they put disputants together, demand concessions, criticize disputants, and threaten them more frequently than do U.S. mediators. Thai mediators more frequently seek harmony by asking disputants to forgive each other and to apologize.

Crossing the Line: A Dual Threshold Model of Expressing Anger in Organizations

This paper proposes a Dual Threshold Model of anger expression in organizations in which the expression threshold is crossed when an organizational member chooses to verbally express, rather than silence anger at work, and the impropriety threshold is crossed when organizational members express anger in ways deemed inappropriate by organizational or social norms. This paper proposes when neither or both thresholds are crossed, the probability of more negative outcomes increases; however, when the expression threshold is crossed, but the impropriety threshold is not, the probability increases that more positive outcomes will occur. The model also builds on the theory of bounded emotionality (Martin, Knopoff, & Beckman, 1998; Mumby & Putnam, 1992; Putnam & Mumby, 1993) to suggest that it would be beneficial for individuals to alter behavior and organizations to alter norms to expand the space between these two thresholds and increase the probability of positive outcomes from anger expressions.

Organizational Anger Contexts and their Relationship to Outcomes of Anger Expressions in the Workplace

This paper demonstrates that organizational anger contexts and the form of anger expression does impact positive and negative outcomes of anger. Anger context refers to an organizations normative rules governing anger expression, specifically defined as the extent to which organizational sanctions are likely to be experienced following an overt expression of anger. We examined 154 episodes of anger in three distinct anger contexts. We identified three forms of anger expression and four categories of anger outcomes. We found evidence of organizations that value the expression of anger and find it useful in accomplishing organizational goals. In these setting positive outcomes were associated with expressions of anger. In contrast, in organizations where anger is suppressed by managers and employees working to prevent expressions of anger, we found both positive and negative outcomes. Thus, organizational context does have an impact on the outcomes of anger episodes.