Conflict management: why can an acceptable compromise disappoint?
When a conflict concerns resources or deadlines, a compromise may meet the parties' requirements yet leave persistent disappointment. The managerial question is specific: how can that disappointment be examined without treating it as proof of a poor agreement?
What the literature establishes
Adam D. Galinsky, Thomas Mussweiler and Victoria Husted Medvec (2002, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show experimentally that focusing on an ambitious target can improve a negotiation outcome while reducing satisfaction with it. Conversely, directing attention towards one's minimum acceptable threshold can make the outcome feel more satisfactory. Outcome quality and subjective evaluation therefore do not necessarily move together.
The missing outcome that becomes the benchmark
Victoria Husted Medvec, Scott F. Madey and Thomas Gilovich (1995, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) studied Olympic medallists' reactions and the counterfactual comparisons associated with their results. Their observations suggest that a silver medal may be judged against the gold that was missed, whereas a bronze medal may be judged against the prospect of winning no medal at all. This research does not concern workplace conflict, but it illuminates a relevant mechanism: an imagined outcome contributes to the evaluation of the actual one.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that lowering expectations is enough to make conflict resolution easier. That would confuse satisfaction with decision quality: an ambitious target can also help secure a better outcome. The aim is not to persuade people to accept less, but to distinguish the desired target, the minimum acceptable threshold and the substantive criteria for an agreement. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What the evidence cannot settle
Negotiation experiments and observations from sport do not demonstrate that changing a comparison resolves workplace conflict in the long term. Disappointment may also signal an unrealistic workload, an overlooked regulatory constraint or an imposed concession. Revisiting the reference point therefore does not remove the need to examine the substance of the compromise or the conditions under which it was accepted.
A practical check in Berne
Within SHR's « Gestion du conflit » programme, an exercise transferable to federal administration, public health, telecommunications and precision manufacturing in Berne involves recording the desired target, acceptable threshold and non-negotiable constraints before negotiation. Afterwards, each party separately compares the outcome with these elements and states whether it is satisfactory, specifying the reference point used. Over a one-month trial, count agreements that meet the recorded thresholds and constraints but remain unsatisfactory to at least one party, then divide that number by all agreements reviewed. This indicator does not prove bias: it identifies situations where a debrief should distinguish an inadequate outcome from disappointment relative to the target. To go further: explore the Conflict Management training in Bern in the canton of Bern, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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