Sanne Feenstra

Workplace conflict is an inevitable yet costly challenge, and disagreements with supervisors are particularly consequential given their detrimental impact for employee well-being. While much research has focused on peer or team-level conflict, little is known about how employees manage process, relationship, and task conflicts with their supervisors. In this talk, I present findings from a field-based and experimental study that examine how different types of conflict influence employees’ use of constructive versus destructive conflict management strategies through the psychological mechanism of mutual concern. Importantly, I highlight the role of impostorism, showing that employees higher in impostorism maintain greater concern for their supervisors’ needs during a conflict, and are therefore more likely to adopt constructively. These findings offer new insights into how employees navigate conflicts with their supervisors and reveal a surprising upside of the impostor phenomenon.