Management and Conflict Resolution: Conceptual Tools for Securing Cooperation and Organizational Performance

In theories of conflict management, managers' conflict resolution skills have often been understood as their relational attitudes and ability to communicate, but choices of conflict resolution strategies in organizational management should also depend on the types of conflicts managers face. Understanding how a complex conflict situation involves one or several conflict types is a matter of understanding the deep structure of the conflict. Knowledge of such deep structure is a key to realizing what the conflict is about and how it should be resolved. The chapter uses conflict theory to distinguish between six conflict types that are especially important from an organizational perspective: interpretation conflicts, argumentation conflicts, value conflicts, interest conflicts, role conflicts and personal conflicts. After having clarified their signifcance in an organizational context, the chapter elucidates how knowledge of the conflict types and how they are logically related to each other can be used in managers' conflict resolution practices. The last part of the chapter uses the conflict types to develop a model for practical conflict resolution in management. The model can be used as a tool for analyzing conflict situations--to gain a deeper and more systematic understanding of how the situations should be resolved in accordance with the best interest of the organization.