ABSTRACT
WHATEVER may be said of conflict regarding its inevitability, ubiquity, or utility in the workplace, its events are consistently grounded in communicative interaction. The form of communication in quantity, quality, frequency, and kind creates the process of managing differences between co-workers and contributes to outcomes achieved from the encounter (Walton & McKersie, 1965; Deutsch, Epstein, Canavan, & Gumpert, 1967; Tedeschi, 1972; Deutsch, 1973; Jandt, 1973; Miller & Simons, 1974; Steinfatt, 1974; King, 1975; Rubin & Brown, 1975; Likert & Likert, 1976; Druckman, 1977; Morley & Stephenson, 1977; Harnett & Cummings, 1980; Putnam & Jones, 1982a, 1982b). Given this central role of communication in the conflict process and the often serious consequences that conflict episodes portend for organizational environments, it is worthwhile to advance our understanding of communication functions in conflict interaction. What is needed and what, ultimately, we intend to define more precisely in this discussion are (1) dimensions defining communication functions and (2) a method for assessing levels of these dimensions in the communicative acts (tactics) comprising conflict episodes.
