Summary
The short story of our friend, the fifty-four-year-old man who had been with his employer for twenty-five years, depicted conflict for him at four different, albeit overlapping, levels and interfaces.
His psychological contract with the company was in transition; job security was no longer a source of comfort. Younger, more highly educated, and ethnically quite diverse employees caused our friend additional discomfort interpersonally. Intergroup conflict, particularly due to a highly differentiated organizational structure with little integration, was a daily source of consternation and frustration for our friend. And on top of everything else, due to management’s strong desire to grow, get larger, and dominate the marketplace, there were these frequent acquisitions bringing with them strange and different cultures that needed to be absorbed. And while fictional, our friend’s story is not necessarily extreme or unrepresentative of life in many large and complex organizations today. Conflict, like change, is a way of life.Even though conflict is inevitable in organizations we are not without ways to manage the process and to help with resolutions. There are tried-and-true ways to help two people in conflict to resolve, at least to some degree, their differences. Intergroup conflict can be managed and resolved as the case example based on an actual situation illustrated. And ways that help us Interpersonally and with conflicting groups can be applied on a larger scale to facilitate a more successful process of acquisitions and mergers. And the changing nature of the organization’s psychological contract with employees may not be bad. Job security is a thing of the past, but giving and being loyal to the organization in exchange for opportunities to learn and develop professionally can provide for employees career security, that is, career security may be replacing job security.
Managing conflict and working toward resolutions require considerable time, energy, skills and motivation. Not dealing with conflict in organizations, however, drains if not inappropriately uses even more time and energy. We know much about how to deal with conflict. Spending more time and energy than we typically do on applying this knowledge is time well spent.
Note
1. I refer to this particular step as “hanging up our dirty linens.”