Pluralistic Approaches to Workgroup Conflict
A more pluralistic model of politics in workgroup conflict can be found in the work of human relations and industrial organization researchers of the 1940s and 1950s. Similar to control and conflict researchers previously described, these authors examine control structures in groups.
However, the scholars that we identify as pluralistic are examining conflict with a more descriptive eye than where conflict and authority are less threatening than the control researchers. Pluralistic scholars documented numerous conflicts between different formal and informal groups in work organizations in rich qualitative studies (Dalton, 1959; Sayles, 1957; Whyte, 1948). One study that epitomizes this tradition is Melville Dalton’s (1959) Men Who Manage. Dalton described a complex set of overlapping “struggles” within and among workgroups based on differences between production and maintenance functions, staff and line, and labor and management. His analysis of these struggles found that they were often conducted via informal cliques that represent alliances based on common interests. Some of these cliques represented a single social category, such as foremen in operations, while others cut across some social categories to unify members around a common interest. The cliques and subgroups commonly struggled with one another while using existing organizational rules, procedures, and resources, mobilizing and bending them to their ends.In an ongoing process of struggle that was much more fluid than the power processes described by research on concertive control or feminist analyses, various individuals and subgroups ebbed and flowed in terms of power over one another in the firms studied by Dalton (1959). The struggles were often conducted via indirect and hidden conflicts that were not evident to superiors or outsiders. Dalton found these conflicts beneficial to the overall organization because they helped it change to resolve operational and human problems. In his words,
Conflict fluctuates around some balance of the constructive and disruptive. Inevitably there must be constructive conflict as responsible officers and close associates work with varying success to adapt parts of the structure to changing conditions and personnel, while others for various reasons resist corrective changes. We are currently so busy hiding conflict that we quake when we must simultaneously deal with it and pretend that it does not exist. (p. 263)
Dalton (1959) viewed conflict in terms of power struggles but had a much more benign attitude toward it than the control researchers.