The Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument<\/strong> (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\u2014such as the five-category models derived from the Blake and Mouton Managerial Grid<\/a>\u2014the 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<\/em> to 5 = Strongly Disagree<\/em>). 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<\/strong> (incorporating avoidance and smoothing behaviors), Solution-Orientation<\/strong> (synthesizing collaborative problem-solving, open information exchange, and compromise), and Control<\/strong> (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<\/span>.<\/p>\n Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument, OCCI, conflict management styles, organizational communication, communicative strategies, Nonconfrontation, Solution-Orientation, Control, dispute resolution, psychometrics<\/p>\n The Organizational Communication Conflict Instrument was conceptualized and psychometrically operationalized by:<\/p>\n 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<\/a> (MODE) or Hall's Conflict Management Survey. Putnam and Wilson (1982) argued that these legacy tools suffered from severe psychometric limitations\u2014including 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.<\/p>\n The OCCI was engineered to fulfill several research, clinical, and applied organizational imperatives:<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n The Nonconfrontation<\/em> 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"<\/em>; Item 6: "I avoid a person I suspect of wanting to discuss a disagreement"<\/em>), remaining silent regarding controversial stances (Item 15: "I keep quiet about views in order to avoid disagreements"<\/em>), and minimizing the gravity of divergent viewpoints (Item 9: "I minimize the significance of conflict"<\/em>; Item 18: "I reduce disagreements by saying they are insignificant"<\/em>). 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.<\/p>\n The Solution-Orientation<\/em> 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"<\/em>; Item 4: "I suggest solutions that combine a variety of viewpoints"<\/em>) 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"<\/em>; Item 12: "I will go fifty-fifty to reach a settlement"<\/em>). Solution-oriented communication requires active listening, cognitive flexibility, and joint problem ownership.<\/p>\n The Control<\/em> 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"<\/em>; Item 13: "I raise my voice when trying to get another person to accept my position"<\/em>), conceptual unyieldingness (Item 30: "I take a tough stand, refusing to retreat"<\/em>; Item 29: "I stand firm in my views during a conflict"<\/em>), and argumentative domination (Item 21: "I dominate arguments until the other person understands my position"<\/em>). While control tactics can facilitate decisive action during organizational emergencies, reliance on this style can undermine interpersonal trust and damage long-term collaboration.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n In 1964, Robert Blake and Jane Mouton introduced the Managerial Grid<\/a>, which mapped managerial styles along two orthogonal axes: concern for production<\/em> (task orientation) and concern for people<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n Putnam and Wilson (1982) challenged this paradigm on conceptual and psychometric grounds:<\/p>\n The psychometric validity of the OCCI has been scrutinized and supported through multiple empirical investigations across educational, corporate, health, and correctional organizations:<\/p>\n 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<\/span>.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n Empirical studies consistently link OCCI subscale profiles to critical organizational outcomes:<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n Subsequent organizational studies have reported comparable internal consistencies:<\/p>\n 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<\/strong>:<\/p>\nKeywords<\/h2>\n
Authors<\/h2>\n
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Purpose<\/h2>\n
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Psychological Construct<\/h2>\n
1. Nonconfrontation<\/h3>\n
2. Solution-Orientation<\/h3>\n
3. Control<\/h3>\n
Theoretical Framework<\/h2>\n
The Managerial and Personality Trait Tradition<\/h3>\n
The Communicative and Relational Turn<\/h3>\n
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Validity<\/h2>\n
Construct and Structural Validity<\/h3>\n
Convergent and Discriminant Validity<\/h3>\n
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Predictive and Criterion Validity<\/h3>\n
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Reliability<\/h2>\n
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Factor Analysis<\/h2>\n