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Conflict 1 Organizational Conflict: The three views Organizational Conflict: The three views Conflict 2 Organizational conflict is a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests between people working together. Conflict takes many forms in organizations. There is the inevitable clash between formal authority and power and those individuals and groups affected. There are disputes over how revenues should be divided, how the work should be done, and how long and hard people should work. There are jurisdictional disagreements among individuals, departments, and between unions and management.
There are subtler forms of conflict involving rivalries, jealousies, personality clashes, role definitions, and struggles for power and favor. There is also conflict within individuals between competing needs and demands to which individuals respond in different ways. Traditional view of conflict is the belief that all conflict is harmful and must be avioded. According to Robbins and Judge in the , Organizational Behavior,2009 states that ” The view that all conflict is bad certainly offers a simple approach to looking at the behavior of people who create conflict”.
Human relations view of conflict is the belief that conflict is a natural and inevitable outcome in any group. According to Robbins and Judge in the Organizational Behavior , 2009 states that ” Proponents rationalized its existence: It cannot be eliminated, and there are even times when conflict may benefit a group’s performance”. Interactionist view of conflict is the belief that conflict is not only a positive force in a group but that it is also an absolute necessity for a group to perform effectively.
According to Robbins and Judge in the Organizational Behavior , 2009 ” The major contribution of the interactionist view, therefore, is encouraging group leaders to Conflict 3 maintain an ongoing mimimum level of conflict-enough to keep the group viable, self-critical, and creative”. The traditional view of conflict is negative. It has typically been seen as dysfunctional, destructive, irrational, and time-consuming-something to be eliminated or at least suppressed. From this perspective, conflict occurs as a result of malfunctioning individuals or organizations.
Therefore, in order to resolve conflict, problems must be identified, causes must be analyzed, and those people or situations contributing to the conflict must be “fixed” (Kilmann & Thomas, 1978). This mechanistic view approaches conflict resolution as a logical, linear process. Robbins comments: “Although research studies now provide strong evidence to dispute that this approach to conflict reduction results in high group performance, many still evaluate conflict situations utilizing this outmoded standard” (2001, p. 384). In the 1950s the emerging human relations view of conflict began to replace the earlier traditional view.
The human relations position suggests that conflict is a natural phenomenon in groups and organizations. Therefore, since it is inevitable, it must be accepted and managed. During this era, the management literature introduced the term conflict management (Nurmi & Darling, 1997); and, by the 1970s, the field of organization development, with its tool-kit of team-building interventions, began to go mainstream, thus providing organizations with new resources for dealing with conflict. Conflict 4 More recently, a third conflict school of thought has emerged, referred to as the interactionist view.
This perspective moves beyond accepting conflict to actually encouraging conflict. Proponents purport that “a harmonious, peaceful, tranquil, and cooperative group is prone to becoming static, apathetic, and unresponsive to needs for change and innovation” (Robbins, 2001, p. 385). Though this view is now widely accepted by management theorists and organization development practitioners, most people in most organizations still dislike (and often try to avoid) conflict. They continue to view conflict through the lens of the three-hundred-year-old scientific paradigm that emerged from Newton’s mechanistic laws of classical physics.
According to this paradigm, conflict is to be avoided because conflict leads to chaos and chaos triggers entropy (the second law of thermodynamics). Therefore, conflict is the enemy of rational, scientifically managed organizations. An example of a criminal justice in the midst of functional conflict would a friendly compatition between departments. Each department all have the same to goal fight crime but each with their own goals to solve the most cases and bring in the most criminals. A healthy compatition between fellow officers.
An example of a criminal justice agency in the midst of dysfunctional conflict would racial conflict . Race relations are a very sensitive topic with any oraganization. To have Conflict 5 that color lines drawn between races and lead to total dysfunction . Nothing would get done and every little thing would be blown out context. Conflict 6 Reference:: 1. www. skagitwatershed. org/~donclark/leader/leadob. html 2. www. hbs. edu/units/ob 3. Organizational Behavior , Robbins and Judge ( 2009)