MGMT 8425M Week 7 Conflict Reading Example

A Dispute Nobody Raised in the Meeting: A Conflict Reading of Three Messages Through Which Two Leads Competed for One Peak-Season Warehouse Slot, Read for What Each Protected, and Whether the Manager Should Force It Into the Open

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Walden University

MGMT 8425M: Responding to Behavior and Change as a Multicultural Leader

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Dispute Nobody Raised in the Meeting: A Conflict Reading of Three Messages Through Which Two Leads Competed for One Peak-Season Warehouse Slot, Read for What Each Protected, and Whether the Manager Should Force It Into the Open

The Dispute in Two Sentences

In September 2025, at a composite home goods distributor's regional center in Reno, Nevada, the inbound logistics lead and the regional sales lead both needed the center's last open warehouse bay for the November peak, one to stage a large import shipment and the other to hold promotional stock for a major retail customer. Neither raised the conflict in the weekly operations meeting, yet by Friday both had made their case to the general manager, through different routes.

Three Messages, Read Closely

The first message is a Tuesday chat from the logistics lead, Rosa, to the center's longest-serving supervisor, Glen, who has worked with the general manager for twelve years: "Glen, if you're talking to Mark this week, the import containers are going to have nowhere to go unless bay 14 is ours. I don't want to make it a thing." The message asserts a need, avoids any reference to the sales lead and asks for nothing directly. It protects Rosa's face by keeping her out of an open contest, and it protects the sales lead's face by not naming her.

The second is Glen's Wednesday conversation with the general manager, Mark, which Mark summarized in his notes: "Glen mentioned Rosa's worried about bay 14 for the imports." The message is now secondhand and softened: Rosa's need has become a worry, and Glen has framed it as information rather than advocacy.

The third is a Thursday email from the sales lead, Aisha, to Mark, copied to no one: "Mark, as we plan November, I wanted to confirm we're still holding bay 14 for the Marden Home promotion per our September forecast review. Happy to discuss if anything has changed." The email never mentions Rosa or the imports. It asserts a prior decision, the forecast review, as settled, and offers discussion as a courtesy. It protects Aisha's face by presenting her claim as already granted and protects the relationship by never contesting anyone.

Face as the Frame

Ting-Toomey and Kurogi (1998) proposed that people in conflict manage face, the public self-image they claim, and that cultural and individual factors shape how much they attend to their own face, the other party's face or both. Concern for others' face tends to produce indirect, avoiding or obliging styles; concern for one's own face tends to produce more dominating styles. Brown and Levinson (1987) earlier described politeness strategies people use to soften acts that threaten another's face. Read through these frames, both leads chose strategies that protected everyone's face, including each other's. Rosa used a third party and a disclaimer; Aisha used a presupposition and an offer. Neither wanted an open contest that someone would visibly lose.

Tinsley (2001), studying how managers from Germany, Japan and the United States negotiated workplace conflict, found that cultural values predicted different mixes of strategies based on interests, regulations and status power. Here the two leads, both raised in the United States, used different strategies too: Rosa appealed to a senior figure's status, and Aisha appealed to a prior rule. The differences between them are better explained by their positions, Rosa newer and Aisha holding an earlier decision, than by any shared national background.

Avoidance, Reconsidered

It is tempting to read both leads as conflict-avoidant and to conclude that the manager should drag the dispute into the open. But avoidance in the meeting did not mean avoiding the conflict; both leads pursued it actively and effectively through channels that kept standing intact. The question is whether those channels serve the decision.

The Manager's Route, With Costs

A joint meeting would put both needs on the table at once and let the leads hear each other's constraints, which neither currently knows in full. Its cost is face: one lead will visibly lose in front of the other, and the meeting would override the routes both chose. Separate conversations followed by a decision announced with reasons would respect those routes but leave each lead unaware of the other's case and risk the loser concluding the process was political.

The reading argues for a middle route. Mark should meet each lead separately to understand the full need, then convene a short joint meeting framed not as a contest but as a planning problem, with a third option already explored: an overflow lease at a nearby third-party warehouse, priced in advance. The joint meeting then decides how to use two spaces rather than who wins one.

What Would Show the Route Failed

If, after the decision, either lead stops using informal routes to raise problems, or routes them only through Glen, the joint meeting will have cost standing the manager did not intend to spend.

References

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.

Ting-Toomey, S., & Kurogi, A. (1998). Facework competence in intercultural conflict: An updated face-negotiation theory. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 22(2), 187-225. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0147-1767(98)00004-2

Tinsley, C. H. (2001). How negotiators get to yes: Predicting the constellation of strategies used across cultures to negotiate conflict. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86(4), 583-593. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.86.4.583