Organizational conflicts: causes, effects and remedies
Discuss about the Annotated Bibliography for Economics and Management Sciences.
The success of an organization largely depends on the successful management of the conflicts that arise from several issues. In a global business environment where the workforce is increasingly becoming diverse, conflicts are bound to happen. In this article, the author explains the nature of conflict and its presence in every sphere of life. He discusses that most people perceive the conflict as just an expression of anger, actions that demonstrate opposition and so on, but they fail to realize that this is only a tiny fraction of conflict. An interesting point made by the author is that conflict, especially in organizations has a positive aspect as well. While some perceive conflicts in organizations as something that needs proper management, others view it as an opportunity to rectify and improve upon the areas of personality, management and functioning. In the later part of the article, the author provides a conceptual framework describing the theories of conflict. Many different views exist that help in understanding the true nature of and reasons for conflict. Some views like the traditional view sees conflict as something that needs to be avoided while the interactionist view see conflict as necessary for an individual or an organization to perform efficiently.
This article focuses primarily on the conflicts that arise within family businesses and the ways this conflict could be managed. The author aims to plan the academic structure of the conflict management field and family business to the examination of conflicts in family-owned business in order to integrate the two fields. The authors claim that conflicts in organizations that are run by families have received least research and study. They further reveal that conflicts that surface within family businesses are markedly different from the ones that take place in other firms. Conflict in family businesses cumulate around three levels that include, organizational conflicts, company growth and conflict and performance, family control and conflict. Further, the authors have also mentioned the influence of antecedents to conflicts and the dynamics of growth influence performance of employees with the family-run organization. The research conducted by the authors further found that work-family and conflicts and work-family balance issues received prominent attention but there is still a lack in the studies regarding the management of conflict in family businesses. Conflict in business organizations that are family-run may be managed with proper governance and leadership. The authors conclude with the statement that the rise of conflict and its management is an issue that has received least attention from the researchers but has great scope in providing valuable insights into conflict management.
Conflict Management in Family Businesses: A Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Literature Review
The authors in this article highlight the ethical conflict within organizations that concern the nursing occupation. The article documents the ethical conflicts faced by nurse managers within their organizations. The authors identified four themes after conducting the study on 15 nurse managers. These included rights of the employees against organizational needs, the spending of the budget, and unfair treatment by senior administration and the organization. While explaining ethical conflicts the authors state that personal values of individuals collide with organizational needs resulting in ethical conflict. In cases where nurse managers are concerned, the ethical conflict arose when organizations made clinical decisions. In most cases, the conflict occurred when the organization that employed the nurses was found compromising with the security and quality of patient care, limited human resources and harassment or other unethical behaviors from the senior management. The authors found in their study that nurses had minimum authority when it came to justifiably resolving the conflicts. It is important to address the position of the nurse managers to find the root cause of solution to the ethical conflict that arises between the nurse managers and the organization. Although nurses are perceived as nurses, but they have more responsibility towards the organization that employs them.
In this article, the authors have elaborated on the identification of the causes of conflicts in organizations. Prior to the occurrence of conflicts, interests of the people working in an organization collides resulting in conflicts. Authors of this article propose control as the ground from where organizational conflicts can be constructively resolved. In addition, they also proposed a technical approach to resolving organizational conflicts by modeling the processes of conflict management in the organizations. The conflict management designed by the authors included the stages of implementations, the elements of the design and the criteria for measuring its effectiveness. According to the authors, conflict occurring in organizations can be managed by forming a balance in the regulation of official powers exercised by the higher authorities within the organization. Heavy regulations hold down the creativity of the employees and thereby restrict them to use their potential for the benefit of the organization. the resulting drawback is further restraint felt by the employee while working within the organization thus affecting his or her performance. Over dominance and control by the superior officials hinders the development of the employees and their need for self-fulfillment and this further escalates conflict. Therefore, it is important to maintain equilibrium in the control of powers within organizations to avoid conflicts.
Employed to go against one’s values: nurse managers’ accounts of ethical conflict with their organizations
Communication, or rather miscommunication has a significant role to play in the rise of conflicts within and between organizations. The authors in this article have delved upon the issue of communication and conflict in organizations. An organization comprises numerous systems and subsystems that are required to work in sync in order to achieve the desired result. The article also mentions that an effective management of conflict might contribute to the achievement of a resistible fundamental but valuable alteration in power structure, communication patterns, ingrained attitudes and consistency. The authors further elaborate on the conflict management and state that an understanding of the organization as a system could be understood by necessitating a multilevel and multimodal conflict analysis. The analysis first requires dividing the functioning of an organization into five different parts – individuals, formal organizations, small groups, status roles and physical setting. These five different divisions are linked to each other by communication with the help of decision-making after scrutinizing the internal and external environments. Lack of proper and clear communication leads to conflicts and even takes place as chain reaction that is one conflict leads to another. In the end, the authors claim that in order to comprehend and resolve organizational conflicts, context, history, parties that are involved, issues, and other aspects must be identified.
The authors of this article have focused their attention on the rise of conflicts in organizations due to incompatibility found in the attainment of goals by the members of the organization. the study conducted by the authors found that conflicts within union-management was the mist prevalent industrial conflicts within an organization. Further, the article highlighted that conflict is an unavoidable phenomenon within the life of an organization. The conflict contributes to poor organizational performance and detracts employees from performing well. The methods adopted by organizations to manage conflict also have a significant role in the successful functioning by channelizing the conflicts properly. In the workplace, conflicts occur due to the difference of opinions of the employees and managers. The article also mentions the influence of collective bargaining strategy on organizational performance. The authors have highlighted several other conflict management strategies in the article apart from collective bargaining. These include cooperation and accommodation as part of the integrative strategies of conflict management. The study also found that non-integrative strategies like domination, avoidance and competition had a negative effect on organizational performance. The article concluded with the findings that proper conflict management depends on the adoption of methods that are compatible to the workplace.
Modeling of the Process of Organizational Conflicts Management
In this article, the author discusses the conflicts in organizations in the context of a global workplace. The author states that conflicts and intercultural tensions are inevitable in today’s global business environment. The article introduced a concept that refers to the circumlocutory experience of tensions arising from intercultural incompetency and conflicts within an individual’s immediate social surroundings. The authors termed it as the ambient cultural disharmony. They explained that the cultural disharmony weakens the creativity of individuals in tasks that are drawn from diverse cultural knowledge. The disharmony arising from cultural discord was found to be an immediate reason behind the conflicts that occurred in the organizations. The disharmony contributed significantly towards reducing the effectiveness of the employees in linking and applying ideas from different cultures. The global workforce comprises people that hail from varying cultural backgrounds with even varied ideas about management and business. Therefore, conflicts in the workplace are bound to occur, as there would hardly be any unanimous decisions taken. The findings of the article suggested that disharmony in culture was destructive for workplace creativity and resulted in conflicts. However, it also found that cultural harmony did not contribute significantly to creativity but it managed to bring down the rate of conflicts occurring within organizations.
Conflicts are an inherent part of an organization and it is important to encounter conflicts because it confirms the presence of creative and active minds within the organization. in this article the author mentions that until the 1970s, most people believed that conflicts contributes towards damaging an organization’s reputation. However, studies on conflicts in the 70s demonstrated that conflicts could also have positive influence on organizational performance. The article also highlighted the different types of conflicts that occur in organizations. These include vertical conflicts where supervisors always instruct their subordinates, horizontal conflicts where same ranked employees engage, line staff conflicts where support staff and line employees engage and role conflicts where fallacious understanding results in conflict. Further, the article explains the reasons behind organizational conflicts and states that organizational design, limited resources, decision-making, compensations, budgeting and planning – all lead to conflicts. However, as the article mentions, conflicts have positive effects on the organizations as well. Initiating necessary social changes, presenting significant problems and finding proper solutions, making quality decisions, developing innovative ideas, organization re-engineering, group cohesion are amongst the positive effects that are the results of conflicts. The authors in the end have suggested that interventions are required to manage conflicts in organizations only when the rate of conflict is higher than what is needed.
Communication And Conflict In Organizations
The authors of this article also talk about the benefits of conflicts in organizations specifically to improve task performances. They mention that researches in this field have produced valuable results to analyze the variables that contribute to effective task performance but those did not explore the composition variables. The authors state that examining if compositions of personality influence the outcome of task conflict is crucial for researchers to comprehend the conflict in teams. The findings of the article revealed that the functions of mediators of the relationship involving task conflict and team management are decided by averages of openness to experience and emotional steadiness. In addition, the article revealed that conflicts involving tasks had a positive influence on team performance where members were open to arguments and demonstrated emotional stability. The opposite was found in teams with low levels of emotional constancy and openness. In any organization, conflicts involving tasks within teams is visible and those who have either managed to channelize the conflicts positively or those who had open indeed and emotionally stable team have been very successful. The teams that have members that are open to discussion and ideas and that show extreme stability of emotions leverage the conflicts to develop performance.
Several methods and techniques of conflict management and resolution have and are being employed by organizations especially in the age of globalization to achieve maximum results. The article in discussion here talks about one such technique of conflict resolution in business environment. The authors first highlight the prevalence of conflicts in organizations and then suggest methods to tackle those. According to the authors, conflict is a noteworthy issue in today’s business environment and the organizations that poorly handle these conflicts find themselves in trouble. It is thus important for organizations to address the issues of conflict responsibly and within short period. The use of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) as a method to resolve conflicts in organizations has been found to be very effective by managers. The ADR is mostly used in cases where conflicts between organizations result in legal actions. In such cases, both parties in conflict could use an alternative solution to manage conflict without taking any legal action. In the ADR method, the two conflicting parties come together and a third mediator tries to provide solutions beneficial to both thus ending the conflict. The authors claim that the ADR has been in use since the 1970s and it has largely helped organizations save their valuable time and money in resolving disputes.
Abiodun, A.R., 2014. Organizational conflicts: causes, effects and remedies. International Journal of Academic Research in Economics and Management Sciences, 3(6), p.118.
Bradley, B.H., Klotz, A.C., Postlethwaite, B.E. and Brown, K.G., 2013. Ready to rumble: How team personality composition and task conflict interact to improve performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 98(2), p.385.
Caputo, A., Marzi, G., Pellegrini, M. and Rialti, R., 2018. Conflict Management in Family Businesses: A Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Literature Review. International Journal of Conflict Management.
Chua, R.Y., 2013. The costs of ambient cultural disharmony: Indirect intercultural conflicts in social environment undermine creativity. Academy of Management Journal, 56(6), pp.1545-1577.
Gaudine, A.P. and Beaton, M.R., 2016. Employed to go against one’s values: nurse managers’ accounts of ethical conflict with their organizations. Canadian Journal of Nursing Research Archive, 34(2).
Longe, O., 2015. Impact of Workplace Conflict Management on Organizational Performance: A Case of Nigerian Manufacturing Firm. Journal of Management and Strategy, 6(2), p.83.
Markhgeim, M.V., Novikova, A.E., Tichinin, S.V. and Tonkov, E.E., 2015. Modeling of the Process of Organizational Conflicts Management. International Business Management, 9(6), pp.1169-1172.
Nwofia, J.E., 2017. Communication And Conflict In Organizations. International Journal of Communication, 9(1).
Oni-Ojo, E.E., Iyiola, O.O., Osibanjo, A.O. and IGBINOBA, E.E., 2014. Managing Workplace Conflicts in Business Environment: The Role of Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). European Journal of Business and Management, 6(36), pp.74-82.
Spaho, K., 2013. Organizational communication and conflict management. Management: journal of contemporary management issues, 18(1), pp.103-118.
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