In a series of studies that are the first of their kind, researchers from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and other institutions found the quality of employees’ sleep is an unexpected driver of conflict in organizations.
The pilot study consisted of 197 online participants who were presented a simple scenario about a work colleague who had been frustrating them and were further told they had been experiencing high- or low-quality sleep. That initial study showed that participants anticipated more conflict when experiencing low-quality sleep compared to high-quality sleep.
The researchers then conducted a primary study where they collected data among U.S. Army soldiers about their sleep, conflict, and hierarchy. Results showed that soldiers’ sleep problems predicted more conflict with everyone, but, surprisingly, this uptick was most distinct for conflict with higher-rank individuals.
“We went into our primary study in the U.S. Army expecting that, although poor sleep might be associated with heightened conflict across ranks, this relationship would be strongest in interactions with lower-rank employees. In short, sleep-fueled conflict would flow downward,” the researchers wrote.
That wasn’t the case, though.
“When sleep problems were low, daily conflict was low regardless of the target rank,” they wrote. “In contrast to our expectations, when sleep problems were high, conflict with those of higher-rank increased significantly more than conflict with those of lower- or same-rank.”
A series of subsequent studies and analyses validated that finding and also provided an explanation for why conflict with higher-rank individuals increased if subordinates experienced sleep problems.
“Avoiding conflict with higher-rank individuals in organizations involves following strict workplace norms,” said Brian Gunia, a professor and area chair for management & organization at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “That requires more self-control, but we know that sleep problems compromise people’s self-control.”
The findings offer various implications for workplaces, perhaps one of the most important being that if employees are sleeping poorly, organizational norms, rules, or protocols may lose their influence among those individuals.
For example, employees rely on their self-control to suppress hostile reactions, hold back arguments, and keep their behavior aligned with organizational expectations. While organizations typically have strong expectations when it comes to interacting and collaborating with higher-rank colleagues, those norms hold less influence over tired employees.
“Employees starved for self-control simply find it harder to follow them,” said Gunia.
In contrast, the norms surrounding conflicts with lower- or same-rank colleagues are usually weaker, so less self-control is required for compliance, and the effects of poor sleep and compromised self-control aren’t as pronounced in those interactions.
Previous research suggests that most major forms of conflict are detrimental for organizational performance because they collectively prevent employees from collaborating to achieve shared goals, which impacts morale, productivity and profit.
“Accounting for the possibility of increased conflict should further incentivize organizations to promote healthy sleep patterns or at least to avoid imposing excessive work demands,” the research states. “The knowledge that poor sleep not only compromises individual processes like decision-making but results in potentially destructive social dynamics such as conflict should strongly motivate efforts to curtail poor sleep, particularly since interpersonal conflict in the workplace has direct relevance for many other important outcomes such team climate, turnover, and job satisfaction.”
The researchers note that such distractions caused by conflict are especially high stakes for certain professions in public health or safety, like air traffic control, healthcare work, first responding, and law enforcement.
“It seems critical for organizations to pull whatever levers they can to support employee sleep,” the researchers conclude.
The research, which also included team members from the University of South Carolina and the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, suggests that organizations may wish to equip their managers with “sleep leadership” skills. Sleep leadership is an approach Gunia and colleagues also study, in which organizational leaders encourage and enable their employees to obtain healthier sleep. Their prior research shows that equipping leaders to use this approach is a way of improving employee sleep, and linking that finding to the current paper suggests that sleep leadership could proactively diffuse destructive conflicts otherwise directed at managers and higher-rank colleagues.
A preprint of the full study, Sleep and Strife: The Effects of Sleep on Conflict within Organizational Hierarchy, was published online in August of this year in the Academy of Management Discoveries.
