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He said, she said: the relationship between reproach and account behavior in organizational conflict

Current research on account behavior has focused on responses to failure events
in which one person is the victim and another is the transgressor. This study builds on
this research by using a framing lens to examine account behavior in a conflict situation
in which individuals are both actors and recipients of failures. After establishing the
relationship between organizational conflict and failure events, the study explored the
relationship between account behavior and three aspects of issue development framing:
conflict naming, conflict blaming, and intentionality. Employees of nonprofit
organizations were asked to read and respond to a vignette-based scenario depicting a
conflict between two directors of a nonprofit organization. The research findings
indicated that conflict framing was a significant predictor of account strategies.
Specifically, the use of mitigating statements was more likely when the event was cast as
intentional and the reproacher accepted blame. A clear interaction emerged between
gender and conflict naming. In all, this research indicated that more attention should be
paid to conflict framing when studying individuals' or corporations' use of account
strategies.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-1864
Date02 June 2009
CreatorsPaul, Gregory Dennis
ContributorsPutnam, Linda L.
Source SetsTexas A and M University
Languageen_US
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeBook, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text
Formatelectronic, application/pdf, born digital

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