Novel Constructs in Conflict Management

Abstract: Conflict management research has long examined how individuals respond to disagreement, pressure, and misalignment in organizational and social life. Yet many of the psychological processes that shape these responses remain underexplored. This symposium brings together four papers that introduce novel constructs and mechanisms to deepen our understanding of how conflict is experienced and managed across interpersonal, ideological, and institutional domains. Together, the papers move beyond behaviors to examine how people make sense of conflict and strategically choose how to respond. The first paper introduces a novel construct of unethical request resistance, a repertoire of seven distinct behavioral strategies that employees use to respond to unethical supervisory demands, and shows how these strategies interact with ethical climate to shape supervisory retaliation. The second paper introduces the novel construct of perceived ideological complexity, showing that partisans systematically underestimate the nuance and variability of out-partisans’ beliefs. The third paper introduces the construct of bureaucratic receptiveness, capturing how individuals’ attitudes toward bureaucracy shape engagement and conflict with administrative systems. The final paper introduces the construct of agentic help-seeking, showing how gendered differences in seeking additional advice shape individuals’ understanding of, and success within, an otherwise unbiased two-sided matching algorithm. The papers in this session highlight how conflict emerges not only from opposing interests, but from how individuals perceive, interpret, and navigate ethical demands, social groups, and institutional systems, offering new directions for theory and practice in conflict management.

Keywords: interpersonal conflict, conflict management, psychological processes, scale development