Conflict within an Organization Is Inevitable - Essay Example

Swarnambika S Academia Research May 5, 2007 Conflict within an Organization is inevitable An organization consists of different groups of stakeholders, each of which contributes to the organization in return for rewards. Stakeholders cooperate with one another to contribute jointly the resources an organization needs to produce goods and services. At the same time, however, stakeholders compete with one another for the resources the organization generates from these joint activities (Burns, 1961). To produce goods and services, an organization needs the skills and abilities of managers and employees, the capital provided by shareholders, and the inputs provided by suppliers. Inside and outside stakeholders, such as employees, management, and shareholders, however, competes over their share of the rewards and resources that the organization generates. To grow, change, and survive, an organization must manage both cooperation and competition among stakeholders (Gasparino & Raghavan, 2001; March, 1962). Organizational conflict is the clash that occurs when the goal-directed behavior of one group blocks or thwarts the goals of another. Conflict can be beneficial because it can overcome organizational inertia and lead to organizational learning and change (Coser, 1956; Robbins, 1974). When conflict within an organization or conflict between an organization and elements in its environment arises, the organization and its managers must reevaluate their view of the world. Conflict between different managers or between different stakeholder groups can improve decision-making and organizational learning by revealing new ways of looking at a problem or the false or erroneous assumptions that distort decision-making. For example, conflict at AT&T between the board of directors and top managers about the slow pace at which top managers were restructuring the company caused a radical change in managerial attitudes (Hymowitz, 2001; Bernstein et al, 2000). A new top-management team was appointed to increase the pace of change and to overcome AT&T's conservative approach. Similarly, conflict between divisional managers at IBM resulted in a major change in organizational focus, from a purely mainframe focus to a more consulting-oriented focus (Nugent, 2002). Beyond a certain point, however, conflict stops being a force for good and becomes a cause of organizational decline. Innovation is, of course, more or less impossible in such a setting. An organization in trouble spends a lot of time making decisions-time that it cannot afford because it needs to adapt quickly to turn itself around. Thus, although some conflict can jolt an organization out of inertia, too much conflict can cause organizational inertia: As different groups fight for their own positions and interests, they fail to arrive at consensus, and the organization drifts along; failure to change makes the organization go from bad to worse (Amason, 1996). At first, many organization theorists regarded conflict as wholly dysfunctional because it was believed to be the antithesis of cooperation. It was generally interpreted as a sign of a defective or an incomplete social structure. Therefore, early conflict theorists proposed that the appropriate response was the creation of structural mechanisms for dealing with issues that generate conflict. Committees, task forces, liaison roles, and many other forms of coordination were recommended for this purpose (Galbraith, 1977). The second phase of theorizing about organizational conflict developed around American organization theorist Louis Pondy's observation that, although conflict may be unpleasant, it is an inevitable part of organizing (1967). In Pondy's view conflict may still be regarded as dysfunctional, however, as a natural condition, conflict is unavoidable and should be accepted. This phase of study led to theoretical interest in the sources of conflict, and a search for understanding of its fundamental conditions. The natural view of conflict helped managers confront conflicts they could not alter or avoid by suggesting that conflict is not a sign of mismanagement, but is rather an unavoidable aspect of organization. Pondy (1967) proposed taking a positive attitude toward conflict. This suggestion was prompted by the realization that conflict can stimulate innovation and adaptability. This view of conflict, which formed a third variant of conflict theorizing, challenged the assumption that organizations are, or should be, cooperative systems. This assumption is implicit in both the dysfunctional and the natural views. The functional view of conflict proposes that conflict is good for the organization because it leads to stimulation, adaptation, and innovation and to better decision making, largely as a result of the input of divergent opinions. Furthermore, conflict is considered to be psychologically and sociologically healthy. Conflict is psychologically healthy in that it allows for the venting of frustrations and provides a sense of participation and even exhilaration. It is sociologically healthy because it encourages opposition to the status quo and initiates conditions for social change. In addition, some theorists credit conflict with providing the conditions for democracy by acknowledging pluralism and encouraging a respect for diversity. The functional perspective also warns that too little conflict can have negative consequences such as groupthink, poor decision-making, apathy, and stagnation. Marx is seen as the father of conflict theory because of the central role conflict played in his theory of capital. It was Marx's opinion that the economic conflicts of capitalism drove relations in society and that these social relationships were fundamentally unstable, leading to the replacement of one dominant group by another in each successive stage of social history. Marx saw capitalism as a phase in the development of human relations that was preceded historically by slavery and feudalism. In the words of Marx, and his close friend and co-author Friedrich Engels, the conflict between bourgeoisie (capitalists) and proletariat (workers) is revealed as follows: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.... Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes... The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, and new forms of struggle in place of the old ones" (Marx & Engels, 1996). There are three types of Conflicts - personal, affective and substantive. Affective conflict is an awareness or perception of interpersonal incompatibilities between disputants. The sources of these incompatibilities are (objectively or subjectively) attributed by one of the disputants to factors associated with the other parties to the conflict or to the relationship between the primary parties (Bono et al, 2002). The latent or overt issues in affective conflicts are not related to the content or process of organizational tasks performed. Thus, it would be appropriate to further propose that these types of conflict experiences are not unique to the context or dynamics of organizations but eminent in everyday life. These conflicts embody significant affective components, and that is why they are labeled as such. The inherent affective components in these conflicts often give rise to expressed, suppressed or displaced emotions such as anger, fear, frustration, friction, tension, animosity, annoyance, irritation, and distrust. Substantive conflict is an awareness or perception of disagreement on a specific work-related matter, which might be a goal, a task, a project, a problem and the like. The sources of such disagreements stem from individual differences in opinion, ideas, and viewpoints pertaining to that specific work-related matter. These differences of opinion, ideas, and viewpoints on a work-related matter might center on issues that are either content-related or process-related. In other words, at the crux of the conflict are ideational, intellectual and judgmental differences pertaining to the content or process of a work-related task. In a descriptive study, Wall & Nolan (1986) focus on the types and amounts of conflict and parties' perceptions involved in a group task in relation to individual conflict management styles, performance, and satisfaction. As a result of the content analysis of parties' descriptions of their conflict episodes, the authors operationalize two types of conflicts: conflicts centered on people, which involve issues of struggles for leadership, unequal workloads and personality conflicts; and task conflicts, which are denoted by issues pertaining to procedural and ideational matters. For their purposes of demonstrating how types of conflict and interdependence in management teams interact to shape behavioral processes, decision quality and affective acceptance, Janssen, Van de Vliert and Veenstra (1999) conceptualize task and person conflict in team decision making as the former referring to "disagreements about the work to be done including issues such as the allocation of resources, application of procedures, and the development and implementation of policies" and the latter referring to "the occurrence of identity-oriented issues, whereby personal or group beliefs and values come into play". While investigating about the amount and impact of conflicts experienced by work groups involved in strategic decision making processes, Priem & Price (1991) differentiate between cognitive conflict, as "task related, involving the degree of disagreement over the interpretation of a common stimulus" and social-emotional conflict as "interpersonal, involving competition for payoffs or personal disagreements". Amason (1996), with an interest in understanding how conflict influences quality of decisions, commitment to decisions and affective acceptance in strategic decision making groups, use a similar typology of cognitive and affective conflicts, where the former is functional and is "generally task oriented and focused on judgmental differences about how best to achieve common objectives" and the latter is dysfunctional and "tends to be emotional and focused on personal incompatibilities or disputes". In an attempt to identify individuals' conflict frames Pinkley (1990) analyzes how disputants interpret their conflict experiences and contends that "relationship versus task conflict" dimension represents people's conflict interpretation frames. Thus, the author's expectations for conflict participants "to differ regarding the interpersonal focus of the conflict" to the extent that "some were expected to concentrate on problems in the relationship, whereas others were expected to concentrate on the external or problem focused aspects" (Pinkley, 1990) have been substantiated by his research findings that: "dimension 1, labeled relationship versus task, revealed that people differ in the extent to which they attribute the conflict to problems in relationship and, consequently, how concerned they are about the other party and maintaining the relationship" (Pinkley, 1990). Similarly, in a qualitative study Jehn (1997) observes the conflict episodes in work teams and contends that team members distinguish between task and relationship conflict. In a subsequent research Simons & Peterson (2000) also report that individuals cognitively differentiate between task and relationship conflicts. In an exploratory study Guetzkow & Gyr (1954) differentiate between "conflict rooted in the substance of the task which the group is undertaking, and conflict deriving from the emotional, affective aspects of the group's interpersonal relations". According to the authors; "Substantive conflict is associated with intellectual opposition among participants, deriving from the content of the agenda. Affective conflict is tension generated by emotional clashes aroused during the interpersonal struggle involved in solving the group's agenda problems". Later, Coser (1956) distinguishes between realistic and nonrealistic conflicts where, "realistic conflict, like Haiman's intrinsic, is a mostly rational task or goal-centered confrontation. Nonrealistic conflict is an end in itself having little to do with group or organizational goals. It is projected frustration or emotion" (Ross & Ross, 1989). Renwick (1975), in an attempt to investigate whether topics and sources of disagreement have an impact on the management of dyadic conflict, also differentiates between substantive and affective conflicts as two different sources of conflict. The author operationalizes substantive conflict as differences in knowledge or factual material and affective conflict as personality differences and differences in attitudes and opinions. The accumulated literature on substantive conflicts is addressed to the constructive and sometimes destructive impacts of these conflicts on group affect, satisfaction, commitment and loyalty - rarely at individual but mostly at group level (DeChurch & Marks, 2001; Jehn & Mannix, 2001) on performance and productivity at individual, group and organizational levels (DeChurch & Marks, 2001; Jehn & Mannix, 2001) and finally on decision and decision making quality and outcomes. Interestingly, there have been only few researches conducted on investigating the links between how different types of conflicts paved the way for the use of specific conflict management styles. Renwick (1975), for example, in her attempt to investigate whether individuals differentiated between their conflict management styles with respect to the affective and substantive sources of conflicts reports that substantive disagreements are most likely to be managed through problem-solving, and that affective conflicts are dealt through compromising and obliging behavior. In a subsequent study on individual satisfaction, perceptions of inequity and quality of group outcome, Wall & Nolan (1986) report that affective and substantive conflicts are handled very differently. Accordingly, substantive conflicts are significantly managed through integrative conflict management styles whereas affective conflicts are significantly managed through avoidance styles. Additionally, Wall & Nolan (1986) stated that neither type of conflicts is associated with distributive conflict management styles. Later, De Dreu (1997) reports that affective conflict is negatively correlated with problem solving, and positively correlated with dominating and avoiding behaviors. Finally, Janssen et al.'s (1999) research on decision-making effectiveness in management team reports significant positive correlations between distributive behavior and both affective and substantive conflicts, and also a negative correlation between affective conflict and integrative behavior. To sum up, apart from Janssen et al.'s (1999) report of a positive correlation between substantive conflict and distributive styles, all researches converge upon the finding that substantive conflicts are handled through integrative conflict management behavior, more specifically through problem solving. On the contrary, although research evidence shows that affective conflicts are negatively correlated to integrative styles, they do not converge upon the use of a single dominant style. The relevant findings are dispersed among reports of affective conflicts managed through obliging, avoiding, dominating and compromising styles. To conclude, both too little and too much conflict results in poor performance, whereas an intermediate level of conflict optimizes performance. This perspective recommends that conflict be managed so as to produce the benefits of optimal stimulation of ideas and fresh points of view, and to strengthen intra-group cohesiveness while minimizing the negative effects of uncooperative behavior or open hostility between units and individuals. Within organizational theory, research is divided between studies of horizontal and vertical forms of conflict. Horizontal conflict is so called because it occurs in relationships that run perpendicular to hierarchical lines of authority, while vertical conflict follows hierarchical lines. The difference can be seen in contrast of inter-unit (horizontal) conflicts between the subsidiaries of a multinational organization, and vertical conflicts between headquarters and a subsidiary. References Amason, A. C. 1996. "Distinguishing the effects of Functional and Dysfunctional Conflict and Strategic Decision Making: Resolving a Paradox for Top Management Teams," Academy of Management Review, Vol. 39, pp.12 - 148. Bernstein et al. 2000. "Too Much Corporate Power" Business Week, 144-158. Bono, J. E., Boles, T. L, Judge, T. A. & Lauver, K. J. 2002. The role of personality in task and relationship conflict. Journal of Personality, 70, 311-344. Burns, T. 1961. "Micropolitics: Mechanism of Institutional Change," Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol.6, pp.257-281. Coser, L. 1956. "The Functions of Social Conflict," New York: The Free Press. DeChurch, L. A. & Marks, M. A. 2001. Maximizing the benefits of task conflict: The role of conflict management. 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