Managing Conflict between Senior Pastors and Their Board Members

Renowned church leaders declare that conflict is rapidly increasing between senior pastors and church board members creating destructive outcomes. Thus, implementing effective principles for managing conflict is paramount. Integrating research from social science with relevant scholarly and popular literature produces six major findings: 1) Church board composition significantly affects the management of conflict. 2) The senior pastor should build a favorable climate for managing conflict. 3) Church leaders should focus on conflicts associated with non-routine tasks rather than with relationships or processes. 4) Church leaders should resolve relational conflict before negotiating task conflict. 5) Church leaders should minimize the destructive forms of task and process conflicts. 6) Church leaders should engage in formal conflict management training to increase their productivity. Church leaders, educators of pastors, and consultants for non-profits who use the 16 research- based principles, which emerge from these six major findings, will dramatically increase the quality of interpersonal exchanges in top leadership teams.