managing disagreement in problem solving meeting talk

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How to Handle a Disagreement on Your Team

• Jeanne M. Brett
• Stephen B. Goldberg

Rely on your mediation skills, not your authority.

When a disagreement erupts between two people on your team, it might be tempting to jump in and impose a decision on them. While this may certainly be the fastest (and possibly least painful) way to a resolution, it won’t help your team members figure out how to resolve conflicts on their own. Therefore, it’s better as a manager to rely on your mediation skills, not your authority. The first step of playing the role of mediator is to understand both of their positions – what one is claiming and the other rejecting, and their interests – why they are making and rejecting the claims. You can do this in a joint meeting with both parties or in separate meetings.  decide whether to initially meet with the parties together or separately. Both approaches have pros and cons. The goal of the initial meeting is to have them leave with emotions abated and feeling respected by you, if not yet by each other. With that done, you then want to focus on getting their positions, interests, and priorities out on the table. Throughout the process encourage them to take responsibility for moving toward an agreement. If all of your efforts fail to produce a settlement, you may need to shed your mediator role and, as the boss, impose an outcome that is in the best interests of the organization.

When you manage a team of people, you can’t always ensure that they’ll get along. Given competing interests, needs, and agendas, you might even have two people who vehemently disagree. What’s your role as the boss in a situation like this? Should you get involved or leave them to solve their own problems?

• JB Jeanne M. Brett is the DeWitt W. Buchanan, Jr. Professor Emerita at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
• SG Stephen B. Goldberg is a Professor of Law Emeritus at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law, where he taught negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. He is also an experienced mediator and arbitrator.

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Exploring face, identity and relationship management in disagreements in business meetings in Hong Kong

This paper examines the discursive processes involved in the construction and negotiation of face in Chinese business interactions. Drawing on 20 hours of authentic video- and audio-recorded business meetings in two companies in Hong Kong, we analyse how interlocutors do facework while orienting to and actively constructing their interpersonal relationships. Our particular focus is disagreements upwards, i. e., those, potentially very face-threatening, disagreements that are uttered by subordinates targeted at their superiors. Findings illustrate that some disagreements are relatively strong but face and relationship maintaining, while others are relatively weak but face and relationship challenging. We not only argue that the processes of doing facework and managing relationships are closely interwoven, but we also illustrate the important role of identity in these processes, and argue that the notion of identity should be incorporated into theories of face and relationship management as it constitutes an integral aspect of how interlocutors construct and negotiate face.

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Doing power and negotiating through disagreement in public meetings

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Managing disagreement in problem solving meeting talk

Angouri, jo.

Problem solving (PbS) talk has been associated with disagreement and conflict as interactants oppose each other's views and express diverse opinions. Although disagreement and conflict have been regarded in earlier work as potentially negative acts more recent work points to the importance of context and local practices instead of a priori categorizations of what the interactants perceive as un/acceptable linguistic behaviour. The paper draws on data from two projects on workplace discourse, one focusing on multinational companies situated in Europe and one on small/medium firms (SMEs). The dataset consists of recordings of meetings, ethnographic observations and interviews. The analysis of the data shows that 'deviating opinions' are not only 'acceptable' but also unmarked and they form an inherent part of the PbS process. At the same time linguistic behaviour perceived as face threatening or intentionally impolite is typically rare. The paper closes by drawing a theoretical distinction between marked and unmarked disagreement. The latter is perceived as task bound and does not pose a threat to the management of the meeting participants' complex identities and relationships. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.

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• DOI: 10.1075/PS.6.3.06LAZ
• Corpus ID: 147643466

Doing power and negotiating through disagreement in public meetings

• M. Lazzaro-Salazar , Meredith Marra , +1 author Bernadette Vine
• Published 2015
• Pragmatics and Society

6 Citations

Discursive control and power in virtual meetings, exploring face, identity and relationship management in disagreements in business meetings in hong kong, doing business and constructing identities through small talk in workplace instant messaging, clinicians’ narratives in the era of evidence-based practice, social influence and discourse similarity networks in workgroups, comunicación intercultural en instituciones públicas de la salud: validación de la escala de conflicto comunicacional en organizaciones interculturales (eccoi), 28 references, alignment in disagreement: forming oppositional alliances in committee meetings, embodied and spatial resources for turn-taking in institutional multi-party interactions: participatory democracy debates, collaborating to restrict: a conversation analytic perspective on collaboration in design, leadership and managing conflict in meetings, corporate meetings as genre: a study of the role of the chair in corporate meeting talk, managing disagreement in problem solving meeting talk, power and discourse at work: is gender relevant, the quality of conversations in participatory innovation, displaying opinions: topics and disagreement in focus groups, negotiation and power in dialogic interaction, related papers.

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