Conflict is often seen as a disruption—something to avoid or suppress. Yet in academic life, particularly doctoral education, conflict is not an anomaly. It can be a structural feature of diversity in disciplines, identities, values, and ways of seeing the world.
This perspective framed an FTSL Graduate School Seminar Series session held in December 2025. Andika Putra Pratama, Ph.D., from ITB’s School of Business and Management, whose expertise includes managerial diversity, facilitated a discussion on conflict management. Rather than offering a step-by-step formula, the seminar invited participants to reconsider conflict as an intellectual, relational, and intrapersonal phenomenon.
Conflict as the Art of Seeing
One of the session’s central ideas was conflict as the art of seeing. Even apparently objective observations are filtered through disciplinary backgrounds, personal experience, professional identity, and emotional conditions. Conflict therefore concerns not only differing opinions, but also how people construct reality. In research, differences can be productive: enriching knowledge, sharpening arguments, and revealing hidden assumptions.
Doctoral candidates and academics hold multiple identities—as researchers, teachers, leaders, parents, and colleagues. Tensions between these roles can emerge as interpersonal conflict. The seminar emphasised self-awareness as a foundation for responsible conflict management. Without boundaries between personal and professional life, disagreements can become disproportionate and emotionally charged.
Relational or emotional conflict can become destructive when disagreement is interpreted as personal rejection: a supervisor’s disagreement with an idea, for example, may be understood as dislike of the student. A constructive task disagreement can turn into emotional conflict when rushed communication, particularly email or messaging, loses its context.
Management Styles and Their Consequences
Using a classical conflict management framework, participants considered integrating, compromising, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and involving a third party. Each reflects different levels of concern for oneself and others. No single style is always right; the emphasis was on making reflective, deliberate choices. Habitual avoidance may prevent immediate escalation, but can also encourage groupthink or superficial harmony that obstructs intellectual progress.
Managing conflict is part of academic maturity. The ability to remain with tension without making it personal allows both ideas and the people behind them to grow.