Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument

Abstract

The Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument (OCCI), developed by Linda L. Putnam and Charmaine E. Wilson in 1982, represents a foundational psychometric assessment engineered to measure strategic communicative behaviors in organizational dispute episodes. Diverging fundamentally from traditional personality-based trait approaches to conflict—such as the five-category models derived from the Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid—the OCCI reconceptualizes conflict management as a situated, communicative choice process. The instrument comprises 30 self-report items evaluated on a 5-point Likert scale (ranging from 1 = Strongly Agree to 5 = Strongly Disagree). Principal component and exploratory factor analyses conducted by the authors revealed a robust three-factor latent structure that accounts for approximately 56% of the common variance, collapsing classic interpersonal typologies into three empirically distinct communicative dimensions: Nonconfrontation (incorporating avoidance and smoothing behaviors), Solution-Orientation (synthesizing collaborative problem-solving, open information exchange, and compromise), and Control (reflecting assertive, dominating, and non-retreating communicative acts). The instrument demonstrates high internal consistency across diverse organizational samples, with original Cronbach's alpha coefficients reported at α = .93 for Nonconfrontation, α = .88 for Solution-Orientation, and α = .82 for Control. Over four decades of empirical research across human resource management, public education administration, healthcare environments, cross-cultural enterprise settings, and correctional institutions have supported its construct, convergent, and predictive validities. This comprehensive article delineates the theoretical paradigm underpinning the OCCI, reviews its psychometric characteristics and factor architecture, details administration and scoring conventions, and presents the authentic 30-item survey protocol.

Keywords

Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument, OCCI, conflict management styles, organizational communication, communicative strategies, Nonconfrontation, Solution-Orientation, Control, dispute resolution, psychometrics

Authors

The Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument was conceptualized and psychometrically operationalized by:

• Linda L. Putnam, Ph.D.: Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Putnam is an internationally renowned authority on organizational communication, organizational discourse analysis, negotiation, and conflict management. She has served as President of the International Communication Association (ICA) and the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM), publishing extensively on labor disputes, environmental negotiations, and organizational framing processes.
• Charmaine E. Wilson, Ph.D.: Professor Emerita of Communication at the University of South Carolina Upstate. Dr. Wilson's research scholarship centers on interpersonal communication, conflict strategies within professional hierarchies, and pedagogical assessments in applied organizational contexts.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument (OCCI) is to assess the communicative strategies organizational members enact when managing interpersonal and systemic disagreements. In organizational psychology and managerial sciences during the 1960s and 1970s, the predominant paradigm treated conflict handling primarily as an immutable individual trait or personality predisposition, often using instruments like the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (MODE) or Hall's Conflict Management Survey. Putnam and Wilson (1982) argued that these legacy tools suffered from severe psychometric limitations—including high susceptibility to social desirability bias, low scale reliabilities, and an untenable conceptual premise that individuals employ identical conflict modes regardless of relational context, status asymmetry, or situational stakes.

The OCCI was engineered to fulfill several research, clinical, and applied organizational imperatives:

• Behavioral Communication Assessment: Rather than classifying individuals into rigid typological "styles," the OCCI measures explicit communicative tactics (e.g., blending viewpoints, raising voice, sidestepping issues, refusing to retreat), conceptualizing conflict interaction as an adaptive behavioral repertoire.
• Empirical Consolidation of Conflict Dimensions: The instrument addresses theoretical redundancies among five-factor conceptual models by empirically establishing that organizational actors perceive and enact conflict along three broad interactive axes: avoiding/downplaying disagreements, engaging in collaborative/concessionary problem-solving, or utilizing forceful contestation.
• Organizational Diagnostics and Intervention: Human resource professionals, executive coaches, and organizational development consultants use the OCCI to diagnose dysfunctional communication patterns within work teams, assess leadership efficacy, design targeted dispute resolution curricula, and mitigate destructive workplace escalations.
• Scholarly Investigation: The instrument provides academic researchers with a psychometrically sound, internally consistent metric to investigate the relationships between communication strategies and critical organizational variables, including job satisfaction, burnout, employee turnover intentions, psychological safety, and intercultural communication sensitivity.

Psychological Construct

The construct captured by the OCCI is organizational conflict communication, defined as the dynamic communicative behaviors and strategic orientations individuals deploy when confronting perceived incompatibilities, interferences, or divergent objectives within formal hierarchies. While earlier frameworks posited five conceptual categories (competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, accommodating), Putnam and Wilson's psychometric validation established that these behavioral tactics cluster into three distinct, robust dimensions:

1. Nonconfrontation

The Nonconfrontation dimension reflects communicative maneuvers designed to circumvent, suppress, delay, or downplay active conflict. It synthesizes behaviors that classical models historically segregated into "avoiding" and "accommodating" (or smoothing). Tactically, nonconfrontational communication involves physically or verbally steering clear of contentious situations (e.g., Item 5: "I steer clear of disagreeable situations"; Item 6: "I avoid a person I suspect of wanting to discuss a disagreement"), remaining silent regarding controversial stances (Item 15: "I keep quiet about views in order to avoid disagreements"), and minimizing the gravity of divergent viewpoints (Item 9: "I minimize the significance of conflict"; Item 18: "I reduce disagreements by saying they are insignificant"). Within organizational settings, nonconfrontation may function adaptively as a tactical cooling-off strategy or maladaptively as chronic passive withdrawal, resulting in unresolved institutional friction and latent hostility.

2. Solution-Orientation

The Solution-Orientation dimension encompasses open, integrative, and concessionary communicative tactics directed at reaching mutual resolution. This factor converges what theoretical paradigms distinguish as "integrating/collaborating" and "compromising." Putnam and Wilson demonstrated that in actual organizational practice, actors do not sharply separate absolute synthesis from reciprocal bargaining; both represent cooperative, problem-focused communication. The dimension includes behaviors that integrate divergent perspectives into novel systemic alternatives (Item 1: "I blend my ideas with others to create new alternatives for resolving conflict"; Item 4: "I suggest solutions that combine a variety of viewpoints") alongside readiness to negotiate reciprocal tradeoffs and split differences (Item 8: "I give in a little on my ideas when the other person also gives in"; Item 12: "I will go fifty-fifty to reach a settlement"). Solution-oriented communication requires active listening, cognitive flexibility, and joint problem ownership.

3. Control

The Control dimension delineates direct, competitive, and dominating communicative strategies oriented toward prevailing over the other party or compelling agreement with one's own position. It encompasses hard-bargaining tactics, behavioral dominance, unyielding persistence, and aggressive nonverbal or paralinguistic displays. Characteristic actions include nonverbal displays of force or vocal volume (Item 11: "I stress my point by hitting my fist on the table"; Item 13: "I raise my voice when trying to get another person to accept my position"), conceptual unyieldingness (Item 30: "I take a tough stand, refusing to retreat"; Item 29: "I stand firm in my views during a conflict"), and argumentative domination (Item 21: "I dominate arguments until the other person understands my position"). While control tactics can facilitate decisive action during organizational emergencies, reliance on this style can undermine interpersonal trust and damage long-term collaboration.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the OCCI rests at the intersection of general conflict theory, interpersonal interaction systems, and communication studies. The conceptual evolution that produced the OCCI emerged as a systematic critique of two dominant theoretical perspectives:

The Managerial and Personality Trait Tradition

In 1964, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton introduced the Managerial Grid, which mapped managerial styles along two orthogonal axes: concern for production (task orientation) and concern for people (relationship orientation). In the 1970s, Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann adapted this 2×2 conceptual space to formulate their five-style taxonomy of conflict modes: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating. Concurrently, Jay Hall developed the Conflict Management Survey. However, these formulations viewed an individual's conflict profile as an enduring personality trait, typically assessed through ipsative, forced-choice formats.

The Communicative and Relational Turn

Putnam and Wilson (1982) challenged this paradigm on conceptual and psychometric grounds:

• Rejection of Trait Determinism: Conflict management is fundamentally interactional. Communicative strategies are situated behaviors selected in response to status differentials (e.g., supervisor vs. subordinate), structural power, anticipated future interactions, and emotional climates.
• Empirical vs. Conceptual Dimensionality: While five conceptual styles look clean in theoretical 2×2 matrices, factor-analytic studies consistently fail to validate five independent empirical dimensions. Human actors do not linguistically or behaviorally segregate "avoidance" from "smoothing" (both serve to manage threat via withdrawal or downplaying), nor do they treat "compromising" as distinct from "collaborating" (both constitute cooperative problem-solving).
• Interactional Theory of Communication: Grounded in systems theory and the work of communication scholars such as Gregory Bateson and Paul Watzlawick, Putnam and Wilson framed conflict as messages exchanged within relational contexts. The communicative focus shifted assessment from internal cognitive attitudes to visible verbal and behavioral strategies.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the OCCI has been scrutinized and supported through multiple empirical investigations across educational, corporate, health, and correctional organizations:

Construct and Structural Validity

In the original validation study involving over 350 working adults and organizational professionals, Putnam and Wilson (1982) conducted principal component factor analyses with orthogonal and oblique rotations. The data consistently converged onto a three-factor solution explaining 56% of the common variance, confirming that a tripartite structure better represents self-reported conflict behavior than the five-factor model. Subsequent investigations (e.g., Biediger-Collins, 2000; Rhodes, 2004) cross-validated this three-factor structure using confirmatory factor analyses, finding acceptable goodness-of-fit indices (RMSEA ≤ .06; CFI ≥ .90) after removing weak, context-dependent items in abbreviated variants.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity has been evaluated by correlating OCCI subscales with parallel conflict instruments, including the Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory-II (ROCI-II) and the Thomas-Kilmann MODE instrument:

• The OCCI Control subscale correlates positively and robustly with ROCI-II Dominating (r > .65) and MODE Competing scales, while showing negative or non-significant correlations with relational empathy measures.
• The OCCI Solution-Orientation subscale correlates substantially with ROCI-II Integrating (r > .70) and Compromising scales, establishing that collaborative and bargaining behaviors tap into a common constructive communicative core.
• The OCCI Nonconfrontation subscale aligns with ROCI-II Avoiding and Obliging metrics (r ranging from .55 to .72), while maintaining discriminant validity against Solution-Orientation (inter-factor correlations typically range between -.15 and -.25).

Predictive and Criterion Validity

Empirical studies consistently link OCCI subscale profiles to critical organizational outcomes:

• School Leadership and Climate: Torres (2009) and Cullis (2009) demonstrated that school principals and educational administrators who score high on Solution-Orientation foster organizational climates marked by higher teacher retention, elevated job satisfaction, and lower perceived burnout. Conversely, administrative reliance on Control or chronic Nonconfrontation predicted increased staff alienation.
• Occupational Stress: Rhodes (2004) examined correctional officers, finding that frequent deployment of Control strategies under conditions of institutional resource scarcity significantly heightened occupational stress, whereas Solution-Orientation moderated the relationship between daily role ambiguity and psychological strain.
• Cross-Cultural Applications: Mao (2010) examined multinational corporations operating in China, establishing that intercultural communication sensitivity predicted higher preference for Solution-Orientation and strategic Nonconfrontation over aggressive Control tactics.

Reliability

The OCCI demonstrates high internal consistency across diverse workplace environments. In the foundational validation work by Putnam and Wilson (1982), reliability analyses produced the following Cronbach's alpha coefficients:

• Nonconfrontation Subscale: α = .93 (12 items)
• Solution-Orientation Subscale: α = .88 (11 items)
• Control Subscale: α = .82 (7 items)

Subsequent organizational studies have reported comparable internal consistencies:

• Biediger-Collins (2000) evaluated special education directors and subordinates, reporting alphas of .89 for Nonconfrontation, .85 for Solution-Orientation, and .81 for Control.
• Rhodes (2004) obtained internal consistency reliabilities of .91 (Nonconfrontation), .86 (Solution-Orientation), and .80 (Control) among law enforcement and correctional staff.
• Test-retest reliability assessments across two- to four-week intervals yield stability coefficients ranging from r = .74 to r = .83, indicating that while situational demands alter tactical choices, baseline strategic communicative orientations remain stable over time.

Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the OCCI was originally extracted via exploratory factor analysis (EFA) with principal components analysis using both varimax (orthogonal) and promax (oblique) rotations. In the original 1982 analysis, the three factors accounted for 56% of the common variance:

Primary factor loadings for salient items routinely exceed .50, with minimal cross-loadings (loadings on secondary factors typically fall below .30). Item analysis reveals strong discriminant markers: items reflecting vocal force and physical emphasis (Items 11 and 13) load cleanly onto Control (> .60), items involving compromise and middle-ground synthesis (Items 7, 12, 19) load onto Solution-Orientation (> .55), and items describing deliberate conversational evasion (Items 2, 5, 6, 26) exhibit high loadings on Nonconfrontation (> .65).

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument (OCCI)
• Alternative Acronym: OCCI (sometimes referred to as the Putnam-Wilson Conflict Instrument)
• Construct Assessed: Strategic communicative choices in workplace and organizational conflict
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire; paper-and-pencil or computerized administrative software
• Item Count: 30 behavioral items
• Subscales (3):
  • Nonconfrontation: Items 2, 5, 6, 9, 15, 17, 18, 26, 27, 28 (and related smoothing tactics; 10–12 items depending on scoring formulation)
  • Solution-Orientation: Items 1, 4, 7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19, 22, 23, 24 (11–12 items)
  • Control: Items 3, 11, 13, 20, 21, 25, 29, 30 (7–8 items)
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale formatted as:
  • 1 = Strongly Agree
  • 2 = Agree
  • 3 = Undecided / Neutral
  • 4 = Disagree
  • 5 = Strongly Disagree
• Scoring Rules: In the original coding system established by Putnam and Wilson (1982), items are scored on the 1 (Strongly Agree) to 5 (Strongly Disagree) continuum. For conventional dimensional profiling, researchers either compute direct mean scores per subscale (where lower numerical scores indicate higher self-reported deployment of the behavior) or reverse-score items (5 = Strongly Agree to 1 = Strongly Disagree) so higher values represent greater utilization. Individual subscale scores are obtained by calculating the arithmetic mean or sum of the items keyed to each respective factor.
• Target Population: Working adults, managers, executives, supervisors, subordinates, and team members across corporate, non-profit, healthcare, academic, and governmental organizations.
• Completion Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument was formally published in 1982 in Communication Yearbook 6, edited by Michael Burgoon and published by Sage Publications on behalf of the International Communication Association. The copyright of the original book chapter resides with the International Communication Association and Sage Publications, while intellectual authorship belongs to Dr. Linda L. Putnam and Dr. Charmaine E. Wilson.

For non-commercial scholarly research, thesis dissertations, and academic classroom instruction, the OCCI is widely recognized as accessible under fair-use academic research provisions, provided appropriate attribution and formal citation are maintained. Commercial use, inclusion in fee-for-service consulting assessments, or wide-scale corporate training distributions typically require licensing or written permission from the copyright holder or authors. No standard public access fee is charged for academic researchers administering the 30-item scale for scientific inquiry.

References

• Biediger-Collins, A. R. (2000). Communication and conflict management styles as perceived by special education directors and their subordinates in Region XX ESC in Texas (Doctoral dissertation, Texas A&M University). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
• Blake, R. R., & Mouton, J. S. (1964). The Managerial Grid: The key to leadership excellence. Gulf Publishing Company.
• Cullis, S. L. (2009). Science teacher retention: School and individual correlates of the intent to stay in current teaching position (Ed.D. dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
• Mao, Y. (2010). Does culture matter? Relating intercultural communication sensitivity to conflict management styles, technology use, and organizational communication satisfaction in multinationals in China (Doctoral dissertation, Ohio University). OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center.
• Putnam, L. L., & Wilson, C. E. (1982). Communicative strategies in organizational conflicts: Reliability and validity of a measurement scale. In M. Burgoon (Ed.), Communication Yearbook 6 (pp. 629–652). Sage Publications. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203856246
• Rahim, M. A. (1983). A measure of styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Academy of Management Journal, 26(2), 368–376. https://doi.org/10.2307/255985
• Rhodes, A. C. (2004). Effect of conflict management styles on stress level of correctional officers (Doctoral dissertation, Alliant International University, San Diego). ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
• Thomas, K. W., & Kilmann, R. H. (1974). Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument. Xicom / Consulting Psychologists Press.
• Torres, G. K. (2009). Perceptions of Michigan middle school principals regarding leadership styles, communication, and school climate (Ed.D. dissertation, Wayne State University). Wayne State University Dissertations.

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)