Intergroup conflict is expressed in many forms and in many different settings in all societies.

In organizations, poorly managed differences between depart­ments or between factions within the same unit can dampen morale, create animosity, and reduce motivation and productivity.

It is important to note that destructive intergroup conflict is only one major form of relationship in the wider domain of intergroup relations, that is, inter­actions among individuals that occur in terms of their group identifications. The discipline of intergroup relations is concerned with all manner of relationships among groups, including cooperative interactions and competitive ones, as well as constructive intergroup conflict. In most ongoing intergroup relationships in all manner of settings, cooperative relations exist and conflict is handled in a more or less constructive manner to the satisfaction of the parties involved. However, when this does not occur around incompatible goals or activities, and the parties work to control or frustrate each other in adversarial and antago­nistic ways, the scene is set for destructive intergroup conflict to occur. Given that such conflicts can be very costly to the parties involved as well as the wider system, especially at the intercommunal and international levels, it is essential to understand them and to look for ways of managing and resolving them, which is the focus of the current chapter.

From the point of view generally held in the social sciences, intergroup con­flict is not simply a matter of misperception or misunderstanding, but is based in real differences between groups in terms of social power, access to resources, important life values, or other significant incompatibilities. However, these realis­tic sources of conflict are typically exacerbated by subjective processes in the ways that individuals see and interpret the world and in the ways that groups function in the face of differences and perceived threat. As individuals and within groups, human beings are not well-equipped to deal with important dif­ferences between themselves and others, and often engage in behaviors that make the situation worse, unless social processes and institutions are available to them to manage their incompatibilities effectively. When differences are han­dled constructively, such conflict can be a source of learning, creativity, and social change toward a more pluralistic, harmonious, and equitable world.

Although intergroup conflict finds innumerable expressions, this chapter will focus on the general processes of causation, escalation, and resolution that are applicable to these many forms. However, it needs to be understood that each organizational, community, cultural, political, and societal setting requires fur­ther analysis in order to truly understand the intergroup conflicts at that level of interaction and within that particular setting, prior to suggesting avenues for handling these constructively. In addition, the general concepts and principles that are available from Western social scientific research and practice have to be interpreted, modified, and augmented in culturally sensitive ways in order to have utility in different cultural settings. In some cases, general prescriptions will be inappropriate and counterproductive, and application will need to await further developments in theory and practice, both local and global.

While compatible with much theory and research in the social sciences on intergroup conflict, this chapter will draw especially on work in social psychol­ogy, an “interdiscipline” between sociology and psychology that seeks to inte­grate understanding of individual processes, especially in perception and cognition, with knowledge of social processes, particularly those at the group and intergroup level.

From these and other sources, one can deduce a social psychological approach to addressing intergroup conflict that is phenomenological (stressing the subjective reality of the groups), interactive (emphasizing the behavioral interaction of the groups in expressing, maintaining, and resolving their con­flict), and multilevel (realizing that understanding is necessary at multiple levels of analysis from various disciplines within a systems orientation). Thus, the ideas that are covered in this chapter come from many sources that are further identified in the preceding example references and need to be combined with the fruits of the other social sciences in order to gain the necessary context and greater meaning. Therefore, the interested reader is requested to search the literature for concepts and practices that are identified here, rather than refer­encing this chapter as the primary source.