ABSTRACT
Maintaining good relationships with co-workers and customers is seen as important for working together. At the same time, such activities as problem-solving and negotiating, involving the expression of differing views or the pursuit of opposing goals, are key to workplace communication and may give rise to disagreement or even conflict. The chapter explores conflictual talk, disagreement, and impoliteness at work, illustrating these with examples from a range of workplace contexts. Some distinctive features of conflict talk at work (compared to private settings) are identified, for example the occurrence or avoidance of conflict may be linked to particular workplace practices.
