In personal and business, conflict has always been part of life. When it occurs, the actors are expected to find ways of resolving it. When it is difficult that the actors cannot resolve issues that endure the conflict, they have opportunity of seeking assistance of mediators. What has been established in a number of studies using different environments is that conflict generates varied phases of conversation.
In most cases, the nature and characteristics of the issues that led to the conflict determine the phases. For instance, the types of conversation that would arise in a marital conflict would be quite different from debt and student’s performance driven conflict in a school. We gained this insight from our analysis of different conversations of parents-teachers and school management on online communities. In our analysis, name calling, labelling, allegation and confrontational emerged as key phases of conversation.
These categories, according to our analysis, suggest a lack of effective emotional intelligence management among the actors. Our analysis largely shows that school management [owners and directors] and other parents are hostile and confrontational in their response to parents who complained about how the school management treated them in the course of fulfilling the expected financial commitment at the end of terms.
Tekedia Mini-MBA edition 16 (Feb 10 – May 3, 2025) opens registrations; register today for early bird discounts.
Tekedia AI in Business Masterclass opens registrations here.
Join Tekedia Capital Syndicate and invest in Africa’s finest startups here.
The school management and other parents significantly deployed offensive names to win their topics of the discourse and silencing the parents who expressed their displeasure on how the school managements managed fulfillment of financial commitment interaction relationship. While the name-calling and labelling fueled the confrontational approach employed by the school managements and other parents by 10.9% and 31.8% respectively, allegation in combination of the duo facilitated the use of the approach by 52%.
The use of name-calling and labelling also had an influence [30.7%] that close to what we found for the school management and other parents. However, the use of the three [name-calling, labelling and allegation] had less than 50% influence on the extent to which the parents who complained about the rusty relationship were confrontational in their responses. Allegation was more severe than labelling and name-calling among the actors, our analysis reveals.
Exhibit 1: Outcomes of failed effective emotional management system
Strategic Options
The insights have several implications on a sustainable relationship between school managements and parents/guardians. From the insights, it emerged that school owners and administrators need to embrace predictive sentence analytics for better understanding of stakeholders’ issues and needs. It also means that stakeholders need training on emotional intelligence management. They need to be informed of the need to address issues they are having with the school managements and teachers without using offensive words, phrases and sentences.
Predictive sentence analytics is a part of the discourse analysis, which affords organisations opportunity to understand interlocutors’ feelings within a sentence structure beyond focusing on semantics and pragmatics of a sentence.
To derive maximum benefits from predictive sentence analytics, school managements and administrators need to deploy principles of name-calling, labelling and identity construction theories. When the principles are employed in analysing each sentence of an angrier parent or guardian, managing emotions would not be difficult as the discourse gets tensed.