Research On The Conflicts In Corporate Top Management Team

In the complex and turbulent external environment, corporations are facing with a lot of challenges and opportunities, thus, the corporations call for one batch of outstanding top managers who have a highly effective cooperative attitude and come from various professional domains urgently. With the development of the theory of top management team in academia and business circle, people gained more and more understanding on the study of top management team, which has become the focus attention among leadership, organization behavior, strategic management and other theories nowadays. Meanwhile, reviewing the domestic and overseas enterprises' cases, we found that the conflict problems become the remarkable issues in business operation, how to analysis conflict issues in the right way, how to guide and resolve conflict issues, and how to deal with the conflict process effectively are the key points of building a successful top management team. This dissertation employed a lot of principles and methodologies based on the multi-disciplinary and the multi-theory comprehensively, did a study on the theoretical analysis and the empirical research to the conflict issues in corporate top management team, attempted to provide a new theoretical angle of view and a practical reference for Chinese corporations, at an aim of aiding corporation leaders to resolve and utilize conflict issues reasonably, and then enhance the performance of top management team effectively.The dissertation includes four parts, and the primary contents are as follows:(1) Through defining and annotating on the connotation, characteristics and main functions of top management team, its special position in corporate core strategic resources is discussed. From the perspectives of organizational behavior, philosophy, dissipative structure theory, psychology, economics, the conflict phenomena in top management team are analyzed, and the framework of conflict theory on top management team is proposed. In addition, conflict problems in different types of corporations are examined. Based on sociology, organizational ecology, and self-organization theory, conflict theory on top management team is expanded and extended in multi-dimensions, which provide a good foundation for the further study.(2) Conflict influential factors in corporate top management team are analyzed, as well as the relationship between these influential factors and the corporate performance, and the influence on conflicts from heterogeneity, trust and cohesion of top management team is discussed emphatically. By examining the relevant mechanisms and interactive patterns between cognitive conflict and affective conflict, a game model on the relevant cognitive conflict and affective conflict is set up, meanwhile, a conflict game model for top management team is presented on payoffs matrix and replicator dynamics equation, and evolutionary stable strategies are proposed. In additional, the influence extent of the conflict mediator variables to corporate performance is examined, based on statistic data, enlightenments for a better performance in a conflict environment are proposed. Furthermore, the clustering principle and manifestations of conflicts in top management team is demonstrated, a group competition model is built to reserve the conflicts. Moreover, risk triggering effect and risk transfer effect are put forward from an angle of conflict life cycle.(3) According to team theory and conflict theory, the principles, the management process and the management methods of conflict management in top management team is sought, five principles, five working steps and two sets of management methods are proposed. In order to build a comparatively complete conflict management system, the positive inspiration tactics, the culture adjustment tactics and feasible interference tactics are given as well. Furthermore, based on the harmonious management theory, a research framework of top harmonious management team is figured out by combining the conflict issues in top management team. The connotation and the characteristic of the top harmonious management team are presented, the operational mechanism and the basic model for the top harmonious management team are put forward, and the new patterns of the top harmonious management team are proposed from three different angels, including the wooden barrel principle, humanism and knowledge management.(4) Selected 20 typical conflict cases, a group case study is carried on to analysis the conflict characteristics from different cases, through reviewing cases, some instructive enlightenments are demonstrated. Then, statistic analysis is done on valid questionnaires by employing questionnaire survey and SPSS tool. In addition, the relevance among the conflict preconditions conditions is confirmed by employing the structure equation model, a structure equation conceptual model from "cause and effect" paradigm is presented to analyze the status quos of the cause and effect in conflicts, and some theoretical results of this dissertation are proven.