Alas, disputes, disagreements, and discord are parts of human nature (and that seems to go double for the nature of business). But research into a variety of scenarios, from interpersonal tension to geopolitical friction, offers hope for a more successful path forward. Here, five Wharton faculty share insights about conflict in its many forms and how to navigate it, resolve it, reframe it, or even avoid it entirely, for better results.
In the context of doing business in a global economy — and also in the context of this story — the first thoughts most of us have when we think about businesses grappling with local or regional conflict are probably related to how an organization might best navigate various socio-political tensions, instability, or all-out warfare to minimize their potentially damaging impacts on the business and, in particular, its workers. But that sort of self-preservation lens, while wildly relevant, isn’t the only one worth considering in today’s world, offers Witold Henisz, Deloitte & Touche Professor of Management in Honor of Russell E. Palmer and vice dean and faculty director of the Wharton School’s ESG Initiative. The ESG perspective zooms out even further to consider what businesses might do to make sure their presence and workings don’t exacerbate — or cause — conflict.
Often, Henisz says, there’s an assumption that simply bringing business and money to an area will have a stabilizing effect, reducing poverty, precarity, and conflict. But of course, he adds, money can just as easily cause major problems if, say, one ethnic or religious group gets it and another doesn’t. “Inequality is a massive trigger for conflict,” he notes, and even good actors’ choices in hiring, sourcing, marketing, and operations can escalate tension and violence if they’re not handled with conflict sensitivity and a true understanding of the groups and communities involved and impacted, the socio-political context, and the region. Much of the work coming out of the ESG Initiative’s Political Risk and Identity Lab, Henisz says, involves trying to get businesses to be more conflict-aware in this sense. One research initiative the lab has partnered in, the Business and Conflict Barometer, offers a suite of data and analytics tools to help scholars and, in the future, practitioners and civil society representatives identify conflict-prone private-sector development and find peace-positive pathways.
