Search results

The professional development of novice teachers is receiving increased attention. Although conflict is regarded as an essential factor affecting the effectiveness of the school professional learning community, it is often hidden unspokenly. This study uncovers the conflict experiences of female novice teachers in an Asian cultural context and investigates how such experiences influence their professional development and emotions.

The case study approach was adopted. Four participants were selected according to specific criteria, and two rounds of semi-structured interviews were conducted in five years to identify the conflicting parties, conflict types, coping strategies and resulting impact.

Longitudinal qualitative data have revealed that female novice English language teaching (ELT) teachers mainly reported conflicts with their female colleagues. Goal, task and relationship conflict are the most common types of conflict encountered, while the strategies of avoiding, dominating and obliging are the most popular. This study also discusses the impacts of such conflict experiences.

This study identifies the influence of culture, particularly a culture of high power distance and an emphasis on “precious harmony”, on novice female teachers' conflict coping and offers insights into how conflict can be utilised to enhance novice teachers' professional development in the school professional learning community.

This chapter examines how structural factors related to gender, managerial level, and economic sector could impact the level of experienced person/role conflict in management based on a representative survey conducted among managers in Norway. Person/role conflict appears relevant for understanding emotions in organizations and is linked with emotional dissonance and emotional labor through theoretical and empirical considerations. Our findings reveal that the effect of gender remains significant when controlled for economic sector and managerial level. This indicates that experienced person/role conflict can be partially caused by perceived incongruity between internalized and gender role-related expectations as well as managerial role-related expectations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of superior support, in the presence of a range of work role stressors, on both conflict and enrichment aspects of work-life interface simultaneously. The paper frames the research narrative of superior support by contextualizing it within superior’s dichotomous and opposing roles of organizational performance driver and support provider.

Survey data was collected from Malaysian work adults. Drawing on a sample of 1,051 cases, structural equation modeling technique is used to examine the effect of superior support, with the presence of work role stressors, on individuals’ work-life experience. Three alternate models are compared: superior support as moderator of stressors-strain relationship; both superior support and work stressors as direct antecedents of work-life experience; and superior support as indirect antecedent (mediated by work role stressors) of work-life experience.

Findings evidence the favorable model of superior support as indirect antecedent (mediated by work role stressors) of work-life experience. In addition, superior support has significant impact on work role ambiguity and work-life enrichment, however, its effect on work role conflict, work role overload and work-life conflict is not significant. Findings of the study also demonstrate the distinct effect of work role stressors on work-life experience in terms of direction and strength of impact.

While superior support promotes greater work-life enrichment, its effect on work-life conflict is limited. Therefore, instead of superior support, employers have to identify alternate resources to assist employees to deal with conflict and interference of work-life interface. Distinctiveness of various work role stressors and interaction between these work role stressors offer practical implications to employer that all stressors at workplace should not be treated as identical and common to each other. Distinct effort should be taken to address different forms of work role stressors so that work-life conflict (resource depletion) can be minimized while work-life enrichment (resource gaining) can be enhanced.

The research investigates superior support in relation to work stressor and work-life experience by scrutinizing the role of supervisors from the vantage point of supervisors as performance drivers as well as support providers. This provides a balanced narrative as compared to previous research focussing solely on either the support perspective or the employee effort extraction perspective. In its execution, the research incorporates enrichment aspect of work-life experience, in addition to the conflict and negative effect. Drawing on the Conservation of Resources Theory, the study teases out important implication for employers and researchers to show that superior support and work role stressors come together to shape individuals’ work-life experience by depleting resources (work-life conflict) and gaining resources (work-life enrichment) simultaneously, as well as drawing out the dilemma of supervisors as performance drivers and support providers at the same time.

Findings regarding the relationship between biological sex and job stress remain inconsistent. In the present chapter, we suggest that this is due to the overly simplistic and synonymous treatment of biological sex and gender. Specifically, researchers have operationalized gender as sex, neglecting the inherent complexity of the gender construct. To address this, we take a more nuanced approach and develop a theory around the effects of biological sex and gender on job stress, considering how sex, gender, sex-based prescribed gender roles and work roles interact to create role conflict. We predict that a lack of congruence between any of the aforementioned variables results in various types of role conflict, leading to stress, and requiring coping. Drawing on the literature on role conflict, emotional labor, and facades of conformity, we introduce the concept of gender façades as a coping mechanism. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This study aims to explore the experience of performing androgynous leadership approaches by New Zealand women leaders within the context of everyday conflict situations.

The research question “How do women leaders experience gender in conflict situations?” was explored through the facilitation of 4 focus groups with 19 senior female leaders in New Zealand. Poststructural discourse analysis was used to explore how participants negotiated positions of power within their environments and in accordance with competing gendered discourses.

Participants described taking a flexible, balanced, androgynous leadership approach to managing conflict situations. While the expectations to be “empathetic”, “sympathetic”, “gentle”, “nurturing” and “caring” resonated with the participants preferred approach, they remained firm that if conflict persisted, they would “cross the line” and adopt stereotypically masculine behaviours to resolve the situation. However, participants describe that when perceived to be crossing the line from feminine to masculine approaches, they experienced significant backlash. This demonstrates the tensions between the approaches women leaders would like to take in managing conflict and the experiences of doing so within a prescriptively gendered organisational context.

This research contributes to a gap which exists in understanding how gender is experienced from the viewpoint of the woman leader. This research presents a nuanced view of gendered leadership as a contested ground, rather than a series of strategic choices. Despite an increase in the acceptance of women into leadership positions, the authors seemingly remain bound by what is considered a “feminine” leader.

Conflict styles are typically seen as a response to particular situations. By contrast, we argue that individual conflict styles may shape an employee's social environment, affecting the level of ongoing conflict and thus his or her experience of stress. Using data from a hospital‐affiliated clinical department, we find that those who use a more integrative style experience lower levels of task conflict, reducing relationship conflict, which reduces stress. Those who use a more dominating or avoiding style experience higher levels of task conflict, increasing relationship conflict and stress. We conclude that an employee's work environment is, in part, of his or her own making.

The purpose of this research is to focus on understanding the work‐life conflict of never‐married women without children.

This study uses survey data from two full‐service health care organizations and a financial services organization. Quantitative methodologies were used to address the study's research questions and hypotheses.

The findings show that never‐married women without children do experience conflict, specifically work‐to‐life conflict, and often at similar levels to that experienced by other groups of working women. The findings also suggest that work‐life benefits typically provided by organizations are frequently regarded as less important and used less often by never‐married women without children than by other working women.

Future research should increase the sample of never‐married women without children, explore the sources of support these women use in juggling life roles, and incorporate comparative analysis across age and occupation groups as well as with never‐married childless men.

The research finds that not all employees value or utilize the benefits frequently offered by organizations. Human resource departments cannot assume a “one size fits all” approach to benefit administration but must recognize the unique sources of work‐life conflict for an array of employees and develop appropriate strategies to mitigate such conflict.

This study contributes to the work‐life literature by focusing on a vastly understudied group of employees whose growing presence in the workforce necessitates further exploration. This research advocates expanding the definition of work‐life as traditionally defined in the organizational behavior literature, allowing scholars to think more broadly about life roles other than spouse and parent that may have implications for conflict.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the experiences of nonnative speakers in conflictual situations with native speakers in the workplace. In three studies, the authors examine whether nonnative speakers experience stereotype threat in workplace conflict situations with native speakers, whether stereotype threat is associated with certain conflict managing behaviors (e.g. yielding and avoiding) and the relationship between stereotype threat, satisfaction with conflict outcomes and processes, and objective conflict outcomes.

Studies 1 and 2 use critical incident recall methodology to examine nonnative speakers’ conflict behaviors and satisfaction with conflict outcomes. In Study 3, data were collected from a face-to-face simulation with a random-assignment design.

Findings suggest that nonnative speakers indeed experience heightened stereotype threat when interacting with native speakers in conflict situations and the experience of stereotype threat leads to less satisfaction with conflict outcomes, perceptions of goal attainment, as well as worse objective conflict outcomes.

The current study is one of the first studies to document the effects of accent stereotype threat on conflict behaviors and outcomes. More broadly, it contributes to the conflict studies literature by offering new insight into the effects and implications of stereotype threat on workplace conflict behaviors and outcomes.

Why did some individuals have relatively little trouble balancing work and home demands during the COVID-19 lockdown, while others felt overwhelmed? Although ample studies have recently been generated regarding COVID-19 employment challenges, this question has not yet received sufficient scholarly attention. This research integrates work–home conflict theories with the paradox-mindset framework, in order to suggest a new theoretical approach for understanding individual differences in addressing work–home conflict.

During the first two weeks of the COVID-19 epidemic in Israel, the author gathered 117 completed questionnaires from their colleagues in the Israeli higher-education system, who were working remotely and teaching online during the lockdown imposed to control the epidemic. Based on a path-model analysis, the author examined whether their experiences of strain and tension in the work domain might be indirectly and positively associated with workplace outcomes via positive associations between these experiences and paradox mindset, as well as negative associations between paradox mindset and work-to-home conflict (WTH) and home-to-work (HTW) conflict.

The study findings highlight the beneficial effect of paradox mindset on the experience of work–home conflict and its outcomes. Although working remotely has great potential to increase the strain and tension experienced by employees, applying a paradox mindset reduces the experience of work–home conflict and is positively associated with certain work outcomes.

This research integrates work–home conflict theories with the paradox-mindset framework. The beneficial effects of a paradox mindset on the experience of work–home conflict and its outcomes are highlighted.

Using classic literary theory pertaining to conflicts, this study aims to investigate the links of various types of conflicts and brand attitudes, in the context of brand stories for search and experience product types.

The authors used a survey of university students to test this study’s hypotheses.

The results reveal significant main effects of four conflict reversal stories on brand attitudes. The influences of man-against-self, man-against-man and man-against-society conflicts on brand attitude are greater for experience than for search products. In contrast, the influence of man-against-nature conflict is higher for search than for experience products.

To generalize the results, this study should be replicated using more heterogeneous populations, setting the study in other cultures, testing actual brands and using a wider range of products.

The findings provide insights for marketers seeking to use appropriate conflicts in their brand stories to enhance customers’ brand attitudes.

Extant research does not address the relationship between different types of conflicts and customer attitudes, and the current study bridges this research gap.