Case Studies Of Organizational Conflict Of Ambitious Senior Management Team

Conflict is a common and inevitable phenomenon in human society. It is often seen in an enterprise,which is perceived as a social cell. There is conflicts among enterprises,departments,groups and individuals. The cognition of conflict and the importance of conflict management are developed gradually.This dissertation attempts to resolve a paradox through case study: while some studies find that conflicts among a top management team lead to better performance by fostering creativity, others find that they reduce performance,State how members of a top management team interact may clarify this issue. Conflicts among top management team have contradictory effects on performance because there are both task and relationship conflict. While task ( or substantive ) conflict improves performance,relationship(or affective)conflict hurts performance. A top management team seeking to improve performance should try to maximize task conflict and minimize relationship conflict. Unfortunately,task and relationship conflict typically go together. Based on two dimensions of concern for self and for others,the styles of handling interpersonal conflict are classified to dominating , compromising , integrating,obliging and avoiding. An effective conflict management strategy should minimize affective conflicts at various levels,attain and maintain a moderate amount of substantive conflict,select and use appropriate conflict management strategies.There is no evidence which proves that task or relationship conflict influences firm performance directly. But there is no doubt that the performance of top management is critical for a firm. This suggests that the ability of the team to manage the conflicts predicts the performance of the team.