The confronter’s quandary: Mapping out strategies for managers to address offensive remarks at work

Abstract

When tasked with responding to an employee’s offensive remarks, managers face the Confronter’s Quandary: They must decide on an appropriate course of action to balance addressing the employee’s problematic behavior and suspected attitudes (Correction goals) while preserving their working relationship and the offender’s sense of belonging to the organization (Connection goals). This paper proposes a conceptual framework to organize strategies that fall at different levels of this Correction/Connection trade-off: YOU-Strategies focus on the offender and prioritize correction; ME-Strategies focus on the confronter and leverage an existing connection; THEY-Strategies highlight third parties to deemphasize the confronter-offender relationship; and WE-Strategies highlight shared organizational values and norms to affirm group connection in the service of correction. We describe four classes of strategies within each type (sixteen total), we include examples of uses excerpted from a hypothetical online survey, and we illustrate how existing literature can be organized within our framework. At a theoretical level, this YOU-ME-THEY-WE framework should help organize past literature and suggest areas in need of further investigation. At a practical level, it should help would-be confronters gain insight into additional strategies available to them, and orient field researchers designing interventions and testing best practices for confrontation in organizations.