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Although emotions are relevant for conflicted interactions, the role of emotions in organizational conflicts has remained understudied. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to this by looking at the role of nonverbal affective elements in conversations.

Bringing together organizational “becoming” and embodiment approaches, the study focused on a conflict which emerged during a multi-actor consulting conversation. The episode in question was analyzed via a detailed, micro-level discursive method which focused specifically on the participants’ use of prosodic and nonverbal behaviors.

Changes in prosody were found to have an important role in how the conflict between a consultant and an employee client emerged and was handled. Nonverbal and prosodic means had a central role in creating legitimate space for the employees’ feelings: they helped to validate the feelings and thus led the interlocutors to act in a more constructive manner in their handling of the conflicted situation.

Findings are based on a single case study. Multi-modal analysis proved effective in capturing the relevant interactions in a comprehensive manner.

Conversational “traps” may be observed by becoming alert to interactional patterns involving repeated chains of actions. A nonverbal response, validating the interlocutor as someone who is entitled to her/his feelings, can be sufficient in providing emotional help in consultancy.

Nonverbal elements of interactions are important in handling delicate issues in conflicts.

To the authors’ knowledge, no previous organizational research has provided a detailed description of a conflicted interaction “as it happened” between clients and a consultant.

Consulting work aims to bring about changes in organizational performance. In OD‐consulting practices, changes are to be sought through conversational settings created for these purposes. The purpose of this paper is to take a discursive approach to change work and ask how interactional change is constructed and managed during multi‐party consulting conversations.

A case episode from an authentic consultation event is presented. By combining ideas from discursive psychology and conversational analysis, it is shown that a consulting conversation may be socially sensitive and face‐threatening for all concerned.

The paper shows how such a “tricky situation” is not to be avoided but to be actively constructed for facilitating change. The use of different discursive strategies for managing criticism and blame is demonstrated.

Tricky situations involving criticism and blame can be used in facilitating interactional change. The consultant's role is to invite personal and focused criticism and to utilize a meta‐perspective and to anchor the conversation in the present situational interaction.

The paper takes an interaction perspective on OD‐consulting (process consulting) using naturalistic data and shows in detailed analysis the activity of the consultant and the clients.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the discursive practices used when the agenda for a consultation process was negotiated in a contract meeting. The paper illustrates the role of sensitivity in meaning making practices, that is, how displays of sensitivity were intertwined with topic development.

The paper offers an in‐depth analysis of naturally occurring conversation in a meeting between a consultant and two client managers. The audio‐recorded data is analyzed by utilizing methodology introduced and developed in the traditions of Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (CA).

The authors show how both the consultant and the clients displayed markers of sensitivity when introducing various meaning potentials relevant to the topics under discussion, and how they eventually ‘negotiated’ meanings through formulations and reformulations of the topics.

The findings suggest that indirect and complex discursive practices were functional in that they afforded the participants the possibility to exhibit prospectively threatening meaning potentials of the issues under discussion, while suspending a more thorough topic penetration. The study sheds light on the importance of the details at the early stages of a consulting relationship and the consultant's specific role at the beginning.

The paper illustrates real life practices in process consultation. This sort of data is seldom used in research.