The Re-Imagination of Workplace Conflict: Imaginative Leadership, Conflict Intelligence, and Employee Outcomes

Abstract: Conflict in organizations is frequently treated as a problem of skills, styles, or strategies which leaders are trained to manage through control, rules and risk reduction. However, these approaches often falter when conflict is chronic, identity based, or systemically embedded, leaving leaders ill equipped to recognize hidden dynamics or envision transformative pathways forward. This paper advances imagination as a foundational, yet largely overlooked, cognitive resource underlying conflict intelligent leadership. Specifically, we argue that imagination enables leaders to perceive latent patterns, envision alternative relational and systemic futures, and reframe conflict from a destabilizing threat into a potential source of learning, adaptation, and collective resilience. Drawing on cognitive neuroscience research on mental simulation and prospection (Schacter & Addis, 2007; Szpunar et al., 2014) and organizational psychology scholarship on perspective-taking and integrative conflict processes (Galinsky et al., 2008; Coleman, 2001), we argue that imagination enables leaders to mentally envision alternative futures, adopt others’ viewpoints, and conceptualize tensions as solvable design challenges rather than zero-sum disputes. Through these mechanisms, imagination may shape how conflict is experienced, enacted, and resolved in organizational settings. First, imaginative leaders are better able to simulate others’ perspectives and emotional experiences, enhancing empathic and relational components of conflict intelligence. Second, imagination supports future oriented sensemaking, allowing leaders to anticipate escalation trajectories and unintended consequences across systems. Third, imagination facilitates the identification of non obvious structural and systemic drivers of conflict, expanding the solution space beyond positional or interpersonal explanations. We test a multilevel model linking leaders’ conflict imaginativeness to conflict intelligence and employee outcomes using a dyadic, multi-source research design. Leaders (N ≈ 200–250) will report on their conflict imaginativeness, specifically how they imagine and anticipate workplace conflicts, as well as their conflict intelligence. Their direct reports (N ≈ 400–600) will independently assess leader conflict effectiveness, along with their own work efficacy, psychological safety, and turnover intentions. Conflict-focused imagination will be measured using an excerpt (4–5 items) of the validated Four-Factor Imagination Scale (FFIS; Zabelina & Condon, 2019), adapted to capture pragmatic, goal-directed imagination relevant to organizational conflict. Conflict intelligence will be assessed using the validated Conflict Intelligence Questionnaire (CIQ) (Coleman, 2026- not yet published). Employee outcomes will be measured using established scales in the organizational behavior literature (Edmondson, 1999; Podsakoff et al., 2003). Multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) will be employed to test hypothesized cross-level relationships while looking to minimize common-method bias. We hypothesize that (H1) leaders higher in conflict imagination will demonstrate greater conflict intelligence. We expect this relationship because imagination enhances leaders’ ability to recognize positive potential in conflict, surface less visible systemic drivers, and design integrative responses rather than reactive controls. We also hypothesize that; (H2) leader imagination will be positively associated with employee work efficacy and negatively associated with turnover intentions. This relationship is expected because imaginative leaders are more likely to engage conflict in ways that reduce threat, expand the perceived range of possible outcomes, and signal openness, competence, and care to employees, thereby fostering psychological safety, confidence, and attachment to the organization. Finally we hypothesize that (H3) conflict intelligence will partially mediate the relationship between leader imagination and employee outcomes. This will occur because imagination functions as a latent cognitive capacity whose effects on employees are realized primarily through its behavioral expression in conflict intelligent leadership, including emotional regulation, perspective taking, systemic diagnosis, and integrative action during conflict episodes. Exploratory analyses will examine whether distinct imagination dimensions, such as vividness, directedness, level of detail, and emotional valence, differentially predict components of conflict intelligence (self, social, situational, structural, and systemic), consistent with emerging multidimensional models of imagination (Jung et al., 2016; Pendleton-Julian & Brown, 2018). By foregrounding imagination as a cognitive precursor to some aspects of conflict intelligence, this research reframes workplace conflict as an arena not only of management and control, but of mental simulation and possibility-making. In doing so, it extends conflict management theory by integrating insights from imagination research and identifies imagination as a malleable capability with meaningful implications for leadership development, conflict training, employee retention, and organizational resilience.

References Coleman, P. T. (2001). Fostering ripeness in seemingly intractable conflict: An experimental study. International Journal of Conflict Management, 11(4), 373–391. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999 Galinsky, A. D., Maddux, W. W., Gilin, D., & White, J. B. (2008). Why it pays to get inside the head of your opponent: The differential effects of perspective taking and empathy in negotiations. Psychological Science, 19(4), 378–384. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02096.x Jung, R. E., Flores, R. A., & Hunter, D. (2016). A new measure of imagination ability: The Hunter Imagination Questionnaire. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 496. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00496 Pendleton-Julian, A., & Brown, J. S. (2018). Design unbound: Designing for emergence in a white-water world. MIT Press. Podsakoff, P. M., MacKenzie, S. B., Lee, J. Y., & Podsakoff, N. P. (2003). Common method biases in behavioral research: A critical review of the literature and recommended remedies. Journal of Applied Psychology, 88(5), 879–903. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.88.5.879 Schacter, D. L., & Addis, D. R. (2007). The cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory: Remembering the past and imagining the future. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 362(1481), 773–786. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2007.2087 Szpunar, K. K., Spreng, R. N., & Schacter, D. L. (2014). A taxonomy of prospection: Introducing an organizational framework for future-oriented cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(9), 467–474. Zabelina, D. L., & Condon, D. M. (2019). The Four Factor Imagination Scale (FFIS): A new scale for measuring imagination. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, 13(4), 409–422. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-019-01227-w

Keywords: Conflict management; conflict intelligence; imagination; leadership; workplace conflict; perspective taking; psychological safety; employee outcomes; multilevel analysis; organizational conflict.