Recently, Associate Professor Wang Zheng in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Management of the School of Management, together with his co-authors, won the Best Paper Award in the Conflict Management Division of the 83rd Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management (AOM) in 2023 for his paper “Do We Know Who Has Conflict with Us? An Investigation of Dyadic Conflict and Conflict Metaperception”.
To gain a deeper understanding of interpersonal conflict in organizations, the research adopts a perspective based on bi-directional theory, methodology, and analysis, and explores a range of questions related to bi-directional conflict. Through two empirical researches, it finds that a large portion of the variance in organizational task and relationship conflicts can be attributed to the two-way dimension, suggesting that two-way conflict is a unique phenomenon that deserves academic attention. Furthermore, the evidence from the research does not support strong bi-directional reciprocity, suggesting that it is possible that conflicting parties do not fully agree on their conflict. Further analysis of conflict metacognition in the research finds that one party to a conflict’s relational insights about the other party relies on biases from their own conflict experiences to a large extent, which are independent of the other party’s feelings. Notably, a two-way sense of trust helps to diminish the biases of both parties to the conflict. The research bridges the theoretical gap in the conflict management literature at the bi-directional level, and the findings are instructive for conceptual reorganization and future research directions in conflict management.
Founded in 1936, the AOM is an authoritative academic organization in the field of management with more than 20,000 members worldwide. It publishes the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review and other journals, which are internationally recognized as authoritative journals in the field of management. The AOM Conflict Management Division is committed to promoting the academic development of scholars in the fields of organizational management and communication management, having a positive impact on management thought and practice.
Wang Zheng is the Associate Professor and Doctoral Supervisor at the School of Management, with a joint PhD from Sungkyunkwan University and Guanghua School of Management of Peking University, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Guanghua School of Management. His main research interests include leadership traits and behaviors and team social networks and team behaviors with research results published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Personnel Psychology, Human Relations, Asia Pacific Journal of Management, Current Psychology and other journals.
Link to the paper: https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.319bp
