Leadership in Action: Collision Courses: When Social Identity Leads to Conflict

TACKLING THE PROBLEM

Research literature in the areas of social psychology, conflict management, diversity, and cross-cultural training suggests a number of approaches, strategies, and techniques that leaders may find helpful in managing potential or existing identity-based conflicts. These methods can be used to de-escalate conflict, avoid further conflict, and reach mutually acceptable agreements between groups involved in conflicts.

However, there are some important caveats for leaders to keep in mind to prevent their efforts at managing identity-based conflict from backfiring:

• There is little empirical evidence supporting the application of these approaches and methods to social identity conflicts in organizations, and the research that ...