Organizations have always had conflict management strategies such as lockouts, legal proceedings, arbitration, facilitation, and mediation, yet some of these options are neither efficient nor effective (Nabatchi & Bingham, 2010).

Most of the literature in the field of organizational conflict highlights the detrimental effects of ineffective conflict management strategies on organizations and employees. We argue that conflict that is hid­den, ignored, or suppressed can be damaging, as organizations lack any catalyst to change policies and processes that underpin the con­flict.

Conflict management systems (CMS) are “the structures that are developed in an organization to facilitate processing conflict” (Conbere, 2001, p. 217). CMS within given organizations simultaneously reflect and inform organizational goals, values, and struc­tures. Our approach is to position CMS as systems within systems. We treat organizations as systems with permeable and fluid boundar­ies that shift and shrink or expand in response to environmental events and emerging internal changes (Putnam & Stohl, 1996). The same goes for CMS. In our view, a systems perspec­tive enables us to highlight the differences in the nature of the conflict that different CMS are designed to engage with. Using a systems perspective, we analyze three clusters of con­flict strategies that can be adopted or adapted by organizations, which we term as law-based, management-based, and participation-based frameworks. We then use a well-documented New Zealand case study involving multilevel conflict within an organization to illustrate how a systems perspective helps inform approaches to conflict management.

Legal and Organizational Context

In the United States, the desire to respond to conflict before it lands in court is arguably one of the key drivers behind the redesign of CMS. De-unionization, concurrent with rapid growth of legislation governing individual employee rights, situated workplace conflict as individually based rather than collective.

Simultaneously, changes in the extraorgani- zational climate such as flatter organizational structures, growth in team-based project work, and greater workplace diversity have changed the dynamics of conflict. Despite the advantages of team-based organizing, the interdependence of stakeholder groups with potentially competing interests and distinc­tive patterns of interactions increases the likelihood of conflict about what is fair or appropriate (Cutcher-Gershenfeld & Kochan, 1997). Many of these conflicts do not merit escalation into full-blown disputes and may be better dealt with closer to the source. Consequently, organizations have started to strategically design CMS that better meet orga­nizational needs (Costantino & Merchant, 1996). Specifically, organizations have shifted from a fight-or-flight method of dispute reso­lution, where formal grievance procedures create a “winner” and a “loser” or employees leave the organization rather than confront the issue, to intervention strategies such as noncourt arbitration, mediation, and negotia­tion.

These trends within the legal system and workplaces accompany a shift in the ways in which we view conflict itself. Gleason (1997) argued that a traditionalist approach frames conflict as disruptive and destruc­tive. Alternatively, a behavioral approach views conflict as natural yet avoidable, and a principled approach goes still further and sees organizational conflict as productive and necessary. Conflict management, then, moves on a similar continuum, from unilat­eral repression or elimination of dysfunctional organizational behaviors, through resolu­tion, to practices and processes that involve all employees generating more creative and transformative solutions to conflict. The Association for Conflict Resolution encapsu­lates the principled approach in its suggestion that organizations ought to develop a culture that welcomes dissent and disagreement and to develop support structures that coordi­nate, manage, and concurrently train orga­nizational members in dealing with conflicts competently (Gosline et al., 2001). Emphasis on meaningful work and empowerment has also increased employees’—and in particular professionals’—expectations that they will participate in the resolution of workplace conflicts.

The underlying issues or motives for the conflict differ in each case. Ury, Brett, and Goldberg (1988) suggest that conflicts are driven by power, rights, or interests. Power­based conflicts, that use lockouts and strikes for example, impose high costs on each party and seldom address the underlying cause of the conflict. Even managerial strategies such as the separation of disputing parties by forced restructuring (Karambayya & Brett, 1994) and workplace reorganization tend to replace overt hostility with hidden conflict, which becomes harder to identify and manage.

CMS or the type of structures, strate­gies, and policies that enable organizations to address conflict can be construed in similar ways. Organizations’ sets of conflict manage­ment strategies may aim to c ontend, settle, or prevent (Lipsky & Seeber, 2006; Lipsky, Seeber, & Fincher, 2003). Organizations with a “contend strategy” respond to conflict by litigating, whereas settlement and prevention orientations to conflict management opt to manage conflict at the lowest possible orga­nizational level. Settlement- and prevention- oriented organizations are also more likely to try interest-based strategies before employing rights-based or power-based strategies. The current preference for interest-based alter­native dispute resolution (ADR) strategies explains the conflation of ADR with CMS.

From our perspective, ADR is only one pos­sible component of a CMS.

Embedded assumptions about conflict and conflict management also influence CMS design decisions. Organizations may adopt one dominant strategy for addressing conflict, such as USPS’s choice of mediation. In this case, the conflict management program tends to operate as a stand-alone silo or stovepipe that is not linked to other organizational units. One issue with silo or stovepipe CMS is that organizations may opt for an off-the-shelf ADR solution such as voluntary mediation and negotiation rather than selecting, or even developing, strategies that best fit the orga­nizational context (Costantino & Merchant, 1996). Mediation currently enjoys best prac­tice status as a conflict management strategy (Bingham, 2004b).

In fact, the impact of ADR-based CMS is not always easy to ascertain, since a strategy can undergo considerable transformation due to the CMS’ linkages with other organizational and extraorganizational systems. For instance, in their efforts to avoid recourse to the legal system, some organizations have created an internal pseudolegal system. Organizationally based CMS may reduce the costs of conflict and improve the balance sheet yet fail to foster the sense of self-determination and organizational justice that are hallmarks of meaningful work and workplace participa­tion (Bingham, 2002; Blancero, del Campo, & Marron, 2010). If an organization’s system is not perceived to be fair or neutral, orga­nizational members may choose to channel conflict in more destructive ways. To mitigate this risk, organizations may choose an alter­native design structure that offers organiza­tional members multiple options for dealing with a broad range of conflict issues. These integrated CMS vary considerably in their inclusion of interest-based and rights-based options and recourse to internal and exter­nal processes. Research on employee voice in integrated CMS has shown mixed results, depending on organizational size, sector, and the type of conflict management strategies used (Lipsky & Seeber, 2006).

Assessing empirical work on CMS is fur­ther complicated by generational changes in research focus. Whereas first generation research questioned justice at the societal level, second and third generation research examined macro-organizational outcomes and micro-level practice, respectively (Costantino, 2009; Lipsky & Avgar, 2004). Systems think­ing is useful, in the first instance, as it links together all three levels. Specifically, Hall and Fagan (1968) defined a system as having four dimensions: (1) objects, (2) attributes, (3) internal relationships, and (4) environ­ment. Within organizations, objects include people, structures and processes. Attributes or properties include the characteristics of organizational culture and purpose. Internal relationships concern the interactions between the objects within the organization. However, systems do not exist in a vacuum but are affected by global and local trends and the political, cultural, and economic environments in which they operate.

Within organizational systems, o bjects include the people involved, their roles, responsibilities, authorities, and the con­flict management strategies employed. The key attributes of the system are deter­mined by the culture and purpose of the organization, which in turn influence the orientation toward conflict. The types of relationships among the objects are affected by the degree of prescription or flexibility permitted within the organization and its selected conflict management strategies. Finally, the overall environment within which the organization operates plays a role in its orientation toward managing conflict—that is, how CMS and subsequent strategies are selected and enacted. The interplay between these four dimensions constitutes the system.

To explore CMS, we anchor our approach with a definition of conflict: “Conflict is the interaction of interdependent people who perceive incompatibility and the possibility of interference from others as a result of this incompatibility” (Folger, Poole, & Stutman, 2008, p. 4). We take the view that, as sys­tems, organizations depend on the percep­tions and interactions between individuals within those systems. The culture, however, of a given organizational system and its rela­tionship with its environment influence those individuals and the choices they make. Thus, the ways in which conflict plays out affect, and are affected by, the chosen strategies adopted by the organization.

We believe that a systems perspective enables us to highlight the considerable dif­ferences in the nature of the conflict that each CMS is designed to manage—differences that can be overlooked by empirical work that compares outcomes such as employee satisfac­tion and case closure rates (Mahony & Klaas, 2008). The conflict management strategies within CMS are not simply a response to the phenomenon of conflict; rather, the specific “interaction patterns and interpretive pro­cesses” (Putnam, 2001, p. 17) embedded in each strategy create, contest, and reinforce particular conflict patterns.

Therefore, in this chapter, we utilize a systems perspective to analyze three distinct conflict perspectives or clusters of conflict strategies that can be adopted or adapted by organizations. We designate these options as (1) law-based, (2) management-based, and (3) participation-based frameworks for CMS design. As most macro-organizational research to date has tended to use a combi­nation of statistical analysis and case studies using data from CEOs, we focus on the impact of the various CMS on other stakeholders, and employees in particular. We then use a well- documented case concerning multilevel con­flict within an organization to illustrate how a systems approach helps inform approaches to conflict management. The case is that of the “unfortunate experiment” at National Women’s Hospital (NWH) in New Zealand. Beginning with a systems analysis of the conflict, we then use the lenses of law-based, management-based, and participation-based conflict management frameworks to highlight the effects of choices, strategies, and out­comes. We conclude with discussing key prob­lematics associated with the systems of conflict management available to organizations and suggest areas that merit further research.