Conflict Management

What is Conflict Management?

Conflict management differs from conflict resolution in that the latter is primarily focused on the termination or reduction of conflict. Resolution strategies such as mediation and arbitration often do not require interventions that result in changes to organizational processes or structures. Conflict management, on the other hand, emphasizes organizational learning to maximize the constructive aspects of conflict while minimizing its detrimental consequences. In fact, recent research in the business field suggests that a moderate amount of task conflict is functional and desirable. These studies also posit that relationship conflict is deleterious to the work environment. For example, task conflict is associated with enhanced decision quality among top management, whereas relationship conflict is detrimental to decision quality. Therefore, an effective conflict management system is one in which employees adopt a conflict style that is appropriate for the situation while balancing the amount and type of conflict encountered.

Conflict management may be depicted as a process of conflict measurement and intervention development. In other words, a critical first step in conflict management is to assess the amount, source, level, and style of handling conflict. Although limited psychometrically sound measures exist to measure the amount of conflict perceived by employees, more options are available to measure styles of handling conflict situations. A comprehensive diagnosis is needed to formulate an organizational intervention. Such an intervention may require that employees be trained on when and how to use different styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Like any other training program, however, this type of process intervention is dependent on organizational support so that employees are able to apply newly learned skills when managing conflict on the job.

A second type of intervention emphasizes changing characteristics of the organization to help manage conflict. For example, the cause of conflict may be a poorly designed reward system, which results in personal rivalries among colleagues and a high number of relationship conflicts. In this case, a structural intervention would focus on designing a reward system that is perceived to be fair. Other structural interventions may focus on changing organizational procedures that cause conflict or structuring the organizational hierarchy in such a way that parties can appeal to a higher authority when they are unable to reach a decision.

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