Conflict Resolution

Pluralists treat power, conflict and interests as interrelated phenomena, in the management and organisational behaviour literature, and in pluralist practice, the tendency has been to give prominence to processes of conflict management and resolution, while relegating power issues to a residual role.
What is Pluralist Approach to Conflict?

Pluralist approach defines the conflict inter and intra individuals, groups and organisations as an inherent and ineradicable characteristic of organisation and seeks ways to manage it to be positive and beneficial. It identifies conflict in the context where organisational stakeholders pursue diverse interests and make competing claims on resources, and tries to enable all stakeholders achieve some degree of success.

Where does conflict come from?
Pluralists do not agree the proposition that goals of organisations are implicitly understood and agreed with by all participants. For pluralists, there are varying goals pursued by diversified individuals or groups of the organisational stakeholders which are not always consistent with the top objective. The impossibility to achieve an overall organisation objective together with other sources of conflict such as structural, scarce resources, different value system, makes conflict a naturally occurring phenomenon in this context, resulting from pursuit of competing claims and demands.

Describe conflict: * Multifaceted
Conflicts in this approach, is multifaceted, emerging from different pressure points both within and outside the organisation. With complex sets of tensions and different claims, conflict situations can be intrapersonal, where an individual is conflicted over goals, and interpersonal, where two or more individuals disagree with each other, or intragroup, intergroup, intraorganisational and interorganisational. * Can be beneficial
Conflict in the pluralist perspective is not a merely adverse thing. It can be beneficial, even essential for creative and innovative group decision making, for an organisation if properly managed. This requires conflict be properly institutionalized and disagreement, which does NOT indicate disloyalty, be expressed openly, and accommodated within properly established managerial frameworks for instance joint consultation structures or confrontation session.

Managing conflict: * Although conflict is thought as an inherent character of organisation in pluralist scheme, due to its characteristic of being possible beneficial, pluralists have expanded great effort on diagnosing conflict and devising strategies to resolve it, although with no ‘one best way’. Despite seeking to enable all stakeholders to achieve some degree of success, it is extremely difficult to come up with a resolution on claims as there involves a lot of different groups in a conflict situation. * Moreover, each conflict situation of either inter- or intra- requires a different strategy or response. In reality, contingency may even complicate these situations and make it more difficult to prepare for all of them. * Furthermore, conflicts are seen to have knock-on effect, meaning they are episodic and serial and solution of one may give rise to conflicts elsewhere. This is especially likely to occur when a win-win situation cannot be created, and one group ends up losing out in the resolution. Therefore, conflict is ineradicable though might be managed. * To sum up the techniques used to manage conflict resolution from a pluralist approach, they are mainly about openly communication participating by all stakeholders (such as appeal procedures, negotiation and bargaining, confrontation meetings) and structural change of organisation. Pluralists have high expectation on the outcomes to be fair and effective.

Managerial pluralism:
[Managerial pluralism, a most popular sub-theory of pluralism, is a form of collective self-improvement and mainly coordinates the conflicts between managers and the consultation of employees. Managerial pluralists resolve conflicts through increasing mutual interests and trust, which is the most emphasised part, and promoting greater individuality as well as establishing flexible work practices.] Enterprise unions are an important part of this strategy. Managerial pluralism implies that conflict can be contained and used to mutual benefit, as long as management and employees can get together and draw up their own agreements and rules relating to work practices. This is possible because mutual trust and common interests allow consensus to develop. Managerial pluralism acknowledges unions as stakeholders and the employees’ rights to membership of these organisations but only as long as they operate according to company policies, procedures and goals. Rewarding performance is usually used as a tool of developing individuality.

There is still room in the pluralist approach for ‘pragmatic pluralist’ managers to concentrate on interpersonal sources of conflict while ignoring many others, particularly political ones (Kelly 1982:173). ???
Some common techniques used to manage conflict resolution from a pluralist approach are shown below:

What is Radical Approaches to Conflict

Conflict, in the radical view, is irreconcilable, inevitable and necessary for change. However, the resolution of conflict is thought to be mostly skewed in favour of management and powerful group by implicitly but nonetheless insidious control. This theory takes not only the narrow organisational level but also in the wider society, which is assumed to be fundamentally conflicted, as background (Hatch, 2006).

The radical approach to conflict can be dated back to before the 1980s, where adversarial model was popular. After that, the radicalism has been developed diversely rooted in Marx’s view, critical theory and critical post-modernism theory. Based on Marx’s view of capitalism, in which management is considered to be the agents of the owners of capital and there is contradictions of capitalism from capital owners and workers, radicalism thinks that different and mostly irreconcilable goals are pursued by workers and management. Resulting from these inherent contradictive goals and interests, Conflict from the radical approach, is irreconcilable, inevitable and necessarily disruptive, and might finally lead to revolutionary position reverse as engine of social change and progress.
In terms of resolving conflict, the radicals stress that management in fact reproduce domination and exploitation for power-control both within organisations and in whole society. On the organisational level, radicals are concerned about what management seeks to do to institutionalize resistance and challenge management prerogative in the workplace, for example, by technology. Technology is thought to accelerate the process of deskilling of jobs, erode worker power by rendering them easily replaceable and create a dual labour market (Braverman, 1974). Extended the model to social level, the privileged few are entrenched while the periphery’s existence becomes more and more parlous (Hatch 1997).

What is Unitary Approaches to Conflict

Unitarists do not talk of interests, but rather of organizational goals and objectives. The unitary approach to conflict has enjoyed prominence in management and focus on the need to control conflict by either minimizing it or eliminating it together. Unitary approach regards conflict as a rare and transient phenomenon that can be removed through appropriate managerial action. There are two main source of conflict is identified, interpersonal problems and personality clashes which is caused by poor communication and failure to understand how managerial and employee interests coincide; and trouble made by troublemakers which is result from activities of agitators and agents provocateurs who are usually regarded as having personal problems.
Assumptions:
Unitarists make no necessary connections between conflict and power, or inequity. They operate within a consensus ideology derived from the assumptions made about the universal needs, interests and motivations of workers. In scientific management, the consensus between management and workers was presumed to be inevitable because of their common interests in the pursuit of monetary or economic goals. The principles of scientific management were considered to promote the economic well-being in an organization, albeit not equally, but they would be self-reinforcing in terms of further concretizing the assumptions of common goals and purposes. In contrast, the consensus ideology of human relations and leadership theories sprang from different assumptions.

Conflict

In management context, the attempts to theorise conflict at work result in three forms of attitude to conflict, including unitarist, pluralist and ridical. Fincham and Rhodes (1996) term the unitary perspective as one in which the views of top management are shared by everyone and conflict is simply treated as pathological rather than a reflection of different interpretations and interests. Pluralist perspective is defined by Knights and Willmott (2007) as a recognition of diverse legitimate viewpoints, interests or approaches. A pluralist vision of organizational politics emphasizes the free interact of interest groups as operating to check and balance the potentially authoritarian tendencies of governing bodies. According to Burrell and Morgan(1979), the radical perspective regarded conflict as inevitable and part of wider conflicts in society. It is recognized that conflicts may be suppressed and often exist as latent rather than manifest characteristics of both organizations and society. This essay will give an account of these three approaches of conflicts and evaluate whether win-win solution can be always achievable through all conflicts.
The unitarism assumes the organization as a unitary whole in which members share common interests. Thereby there is no or should be no conflict. But conflict still exists because of poor communication by management and intervention of troublemakers, such as unions. Conflict has been considered as a source of dysfunctions, a threat to sustain synergy between the interests of individuals and the goals of the organization. Therefore it must be removed at every possible opportunity through appropriate managerial action. For example, communicating with others to enforce mission better, and help or just exclude the against ones. Eventually, everyone fright for the same objectives, for instance profit maximization. Corporate culture, mission statements and HRM are the contemporary examples of this. Kreiner (et al, 1999) illustrates the importance of learning to manage resistance for managers. Moreover, the unitary formed the classical school and were characterized by a focus on the formal organization with adoption of some organizational principles. It contributes to emphasize the importance of defined authority structures and clarity in role specification. However, it fails to recognize the importance of power, competition and conflict, indicating part irrationality. Additionally, the political assumption itself is problematic. It reification of organization over individual, putting the organization at the first place no matter it is amoral and reducing people to function of organization. It insists on managerial unquestionable authority and considers other voices as illegitimate to exclude.

Differing from the unitarist approach, the pluralist one is placing emphasis on diversity, conflict and competition. It assumes the organization to be a complex social unit in which a great many social groups interact with different interests. For instance, marketing and production departments’ interests maybe in conflict, as well as the environment and CEO. The emergence of conflict is inevitable and normal, thus should accept within organizational mission. Pluralist deems the differences of interests potentially result in innovation and changes as well as greater levels of participation in decision making among individuals (Knight and Odih, 2007). Pascale (1991) also reveal the idea that conflict can enhance organizational agenda. In the pluralist understanding, conflict should be continual managed through balancing and coordinating competing interests. Managers act as neutral and take measures to balance stakeholders’ interests. Negotiating with unions and pressure groups is another possible way. However, like unitarism, pluralism suffers two problematic effects of political assumptions. In addition to this, the conception of power is discussed too little. Politics and negotiations are so small part that cannot challenge the prevailing structures. Managers only act as the neutral and don’t have their own interests. Big issues of conflict are still marginalized, such as poverty and the environment.
Conflict, in the radical view, is irreconcilable, inevitable and necessary for change. However, the resolution of conflict is thought to be mostly skewed in favour of management and powerful group by implicitly but nonetheless insidious control. This theory takes not only the narrow organisational level but also in the wider society, which is assumed to be fundamentally conflicted, as background (Hatch, 2006). The radical approach to conflict can be dated back to before the 1980s, where adversarial model was popular. After that, the radicalism has been developed diversely rooted in Marx’s view, critical theory and critical post-modernism theory. Based on Marx’s view of capitalism, in which management is considered to be the agents of the owners of capital and there is contradictions of capitalism from capital owners and workers, radicalism thinks that different and mostly irreconcilable goals are pursued by workers and management. Resulting from these inherent contradictive goals and interests, Conflict from the radical approach, is irreconcilable, inevitable and necessarily disruptive, and might finally lead to revolutionary position reverse as engine of social change and progress.

Can all conflict be negotiated to a win-win solution? No, because some conflicts are rooted in real inequalities and injustices that can’t be done away with. For example, an employer might agree to allow his staff to work a flexible rota. That might seem like a fair resolution to a conflict about working hours; but only if the employees accept that they have to subject to the dictates of the employment relationship. Also, the idea of ‘win-win’ only makes sense if you see each party as an independent negotiating unit. Partners in an alliance might find that while one maximizes production capacity the other extends market reach. They both ‘win’ in the sense that the explicit interests of each of them are expressed in the alliance, but this only remains a reality as long as their relationship continues, which involves many other tacit aspects, not to do with ‘winning’ but with shared ‘themes’ and ‘plots’.