Individuals and Intractable Conflict

Roy Lewicki

Professor of Management and Human Resources at Ohio State University

Interviewed by Julian Portilla, 2003


This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).

There are probably people who work together everyday or every week who have what we would call intractable disputes. I, for a long time, had intractable disputes with my father. He and I were politically completely different from each other. Every time we got together we would have huge fights over some political issue. That was intractable. Neither one of us were about to change. How do we along? Lots of times we chose not to talk about those things so it wouldn't divide us up. How we manage these issues in complex relationships is something we really don't know a great deal about; that's a big untapped area.