Conflicts of Client Commitment: Experience, Bases, and Action Strategies

Individuals can commit to multiple targets and these targets can interact in dynamic ways to patinate the everyday experience of work and life. While commitments are known to interact, including conflict, empirical evidence on the causes of commitment conflict and that which is multi-party and intrapsychic is lacking. Even less developed is knowledge of the action strategies and coping mechanisms that individuals deploy in relation to conflicts of commitment. Third, we currently know little about workplace commitment outside of the boundaries of organisational employment. Drawing on a pragmatist-informed qualitative study and interviews with 50 independent consultants, we address these issues and investigate the causes and action strategies used in cases of conflict of client commitment. In our model, we show that these are based on time, knowledge, and expectations and develop the responses of avoiding, turning the conflict into a synergy, preventing, and changing the nature of the relationship. We further develop an understanding of how these conflicts become triggered and manifest, the situated and deep-structured responses, and then how the commitment becomes dormant or is no more. Our paper develops important knowledge on the interaction of commitment in a dynamic system of multiple targets. We respond to calls to examine commitment conflict, investigate workplace commitment experiences through qualitative methods, and consider commitment in alternative yet increasingly common ways of working. Throughout, we differentiate commitment conflict from dyadic conflict, and from that centred on roles, teams, and identity thus developing commitment conflict as a discrete and standalone concept.