Conflict is a familiar part of organisational life. Conflict is generally deemed detrimental to satisfaction and performance and, when poorly managed, conflict can have negative long-term consequences for individual health and well-being.

Therefore, that many managers and employees view conflict as negative, dysfunctional and worth avoiding is not surprising. Today many organisations offer conflict management training to both management and staff. Yet no empirical studies show how conflict management training impacts workplace conflicts, co-worker relationships and collaboration in an organisational context. This dearth of studies is remarkable, given that the conflict research literature for four decades has posited conflicts in organisations as inevitable processes that need management through particular forms of intervention that, if managed correctly, can bring about development, collaboration, problem solving, and organisational change.

This study employs the method of ethnographic fieldwork, complementing interviews with participant observations, to investigate (1) how workplace conflicts are made sense of in an organisation, and (2) how training in conflict management changes sensemakings of workplace conflicts. Theory on sensemaking could improve our understanding of conflict meaning and its relation to conflict outcomes, including how the dynamics of conflict meanings unfold and shift in the organisational context. This study therefore integrates insights from Weick’s theory of organizational sensemaking to explore how individuals engage in sensemaking about conflicts in the workplace.