| Limitations in openness, recall, and access to genuine communication have challenged studies of organizational conflict communication. The publishing of Enron's email database not only allowed access to genuine organizational conflict communication, but also access to communication occurring before and during an organization's crisis. The purpose of this study was to determine how organizational conflict messages changed from pre-crisis to crisis.;A total of 1976 emails from the Enron corpus were coded for the presence of conflict. Of the emails examined, the 203 messages determined to include conflict were also coded for timing of the message in relation to the Enron crisis, conflict management style presented in the message, and level of appropriateness in the message. Grounded in Zillmann's (1993) theory of impulsive aggression, and incorporating both Rahim's (1983) conflict styles and Spitzberg and Cupach's (1989) conceptualization of communication appropriateness, hypotheses were proposed to test whether crisis increased conflict frequency, produced less other-focused conflict management styles, and decreased conflict message appropriateness.;Hypotheses were tested using chi-square and factorial ANOVA. No relationship was found between the presence of crisis and either conflict frequency or conflict style.;However, Hypothesis 3 was supported. Conflict messages during a crisis were less appropriate than messages before the crisis. In addition, conflict messages between Enron employees were found to be more appropriate than conflict messages with non-Enron addressees. Finally, the advantages and challenges of examining real conflict communication were discussed. |
