Conflict management: can contact between departments reduce prejudice?
When one department consistently describes another as rigid or careless, a technical disagreement becomes laden with judgements about the group. The managerial question is specific: can arranging work-related encounters between departments reduce these prejudices before the next dispute?
What the literature establishes
Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp (2006, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) show in a meta-analysis that intergroup contact is generally associated with reduced prejudice. This relationship is stronger when contact takes place under favourable conditions, including equal status within the situation, cooperation, common goals and institutional support. These conditions facilitate the effect without all being essential prerequisites.
Contact does more than convey information
Thomas F. Pettigrew and Linda R. Tropp (2008, European Journal of Social Psychology) examine three mechanisms that may explain this relationship: increased knowledge, reduced anxiety, and greater empathy and perspective-taking. Their analyses give more weight to the latter two than to learning about the other group alone. For a manager, this suggests that a presentation of another department's procedures cannot replace an interaction in which everyone can ask questions without feeling threatened.
The premature conclusion
One might conclude that departments in conflict simply need to meet more often. Yet these studies do not justify equating a compulsory meeting with cooperative contact under favourable conditions. An encounter in which one department is only required to justify its mistakes to the other risks reproducing the imbalance rather than changing perceptions. (our executive and employee training programmes)
What these data do not demonstrate
These studies concern intergroup prejudice, not conflict resolution in precision manufacturing firms directly. The second meta-analysis builds on the first and does not constitute independent validation in this industrial context. Improved perceptions therefore demonstrate neither the disappearance of a disagreement over tolerances nor a reduction in manufacturing defects.
A practical check in Neuchâtel
In a Neuchâtel microtechnology, watchmaking or precision microelectronics company, an exercise within SHR's “Gestion du conflit” programme could take the form of reciprocal observation between manufacturing engineering and quality, using a closed case with no implications for individual appraisal. Before the exchange and again during the next comparable dispute, ask each participant to identify a verifiable constraint affecting the other department and have that department confirm or correct it. The indicator would be the proportion of constraints confirmed without correction, alongside the number of responses provided: a check on mutual understanding, not proof of reduced conflict. To go further: explore the Conflict Management training in Neuchâtel in the canton of Neuchâtel, or browse our executive and employee training programmes in Switzerland.
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