Reducing Interpersonal Conflict Through Mindfulness Training: Emotion Regulation As Mediator

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Although interpersonal conflict is ubiquitous in the workplace, studies show that individuals often avoid conflict, which can have detrimental effects for the individual, team, and organization. Limited research has explored how conflict avoidance can be reduced. In the present paper the authors theorized that conflict avoidance could be lessened by increasing individuals’ ability to accept their emotions. Mindfulness training was utilized as an intervention to increase emotion acceptance. The results show that after the training (a) participants in the mindfulness training program reported lower conflict avoidance relative to pre-training levels and in comparison to participants in a control group, and (b) emotion acceptance mediated these effects. We then discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.