Bulldozer00's Blog

With no scientific backing or personal credentials to provide me with any semblance of credibility, I assert that conflict aversion and cultures of fear go together like hand and glove; Jenny and Forrest; peas and carrots; peanut butter and chocolate.

In an org that operates in accordance with a culture of fear, inter-personal and inter-group conflicts are avoided at all costs because of the fear of post-conflict consequences. If a culture of fear doesn’t already exist, all it takes is one or two publicly visible rebukes of a conflict initiator to snap a “culture of fear” into place. Common forms of rebuke are: peek-a-boo visits, compensation ceilings, withholding of career development opportunities, placement on a formal performance improvement plan (affectionately called a “PIP”), and covert persecution.  The closer to home that a conflict initiator treads to a hairball problem that is eroding performance of the whole, the more severe the rebuke.

In a culture of fear, because there’s no sane incentive for motivating well-meaning people to point out emergent org problems that everybody already knows about, nobody does nuthin’ of substance until there’s a crisis. When a crisis inevitably manifests because of problem neglect, conflict aversion temporarily goes out the window because real feelings and passions bubble to the surface. Under the duress of a crisis, the conflicts that do emerge in a normally conflict averse org are much more explosive and damaging than those that occur in a continuously conflict-accepting org. Thus, when the crisis passes, the left over socio-communication system infrastructure wreckage breeds poorer future performance and a regression back into – you guessed it – the same old, same old, conflict averse way of operation. Bummer.