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Organizational
Reflections on Organizational
Change
Management
Conflict
2,2 by
Louis R. Pondy
94 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the analysis of organizational conflict
that I presented in my 1967 Administrative Science Quarterly paper, "Organizational
Conflict: Concepts and Models".
My 1967 conflict model was right for its time. It presented conflict as an
aberration, as a breakdown in standard processes, as a temporary outbreak or
outcropping in the otherwise smooth flow of a stable and cooperative set of
relationships that made up an organization.
Admittedly, conflict was presented as inevitable because of the inherent
differences in perceptions and goals of the organization members. And conflict
was even depicted as functional, provided that it didn't threaten the very basis
of the relationship, because constructive conflict might move the organization to
new heights of creativity and innovation and competitive energy.
But despite the inevitability and functionality of conflict, it was still interpreted
as something that happened to the relationship, something that arose out of latent
differences, or out of competition for scarce resources, or out of threats to
autonomy needs, all necessary features of formal organizations. It was seen to
surface in relationships as feelings and perceptions and behavioral manifestations.
And such episodes or outbreaks of conflict were pictured as leaving behind an
aftermath of misperceptions and hard feelings which formed the seed and nucleus
of subsequent conflicts.
With proper care, the worst conflicts could be avoided by proper organization
design, or by proper training of members to hold similar perceptions and goals,
or as a last resort to decouple conflicting parties by reducing interdependencies
between them. Those conflicts that did arise could nevertheless be prevented
from escalating, according to the model, by skillful use of conflict resolution
techniques. The underlying relationship could be preserved as a dynamic and
homeostatic equilibrium, straining toward but never quite reaching perfect harmony,
despite its being subject to the unending waves of conflict episodes.
Within the model, the on-going relationship itself, and the assumptions
undergirding it, were not subject to question or attack or redefinition. The use
of raw power or of violence for redressing grievances or for altering the fundamental
nature of the relationship played little or no role in the model. Power, violence,
dissolution or revolution might occur between nations, or gangs, or social classes,
or within troubled families, but not within those islands of sanity and purposiveness
called formal organizations. And even the extreme forms of conflict that might
occur within other types of social systems were seen as those systems gone
haywire.
But above all, the basic image of organizations in which the model was embedded Reflections on
was that of what Chester Barnard, nearly thirty years earlier, had called a Organizational
cooperative system. And if organizations are "cooperative systems", the occurrence Conflict
of conflict must be a malfunction of some kind, albeit inevitable and occasionally
functional.
Influences on My Thinking
My thinking on conflict was heavily influenced by March and Simon's Organizations, 95
which was published in 1958, only about four years before I began the reading
and thinking that eventually led up to the 1967 ASQ paper. Although both March
and Simon were trained as political scientists and therefore used to thinking about
power and conflict, the implicit root metaphor that ran throughout Organizations
was the electronic computer, then only a few years old and still a fresh and powerful
metaphor. Organizations were treated as giant information processing and decision-
making machines, with preprogrammed subroutines to be evoked by appropriate
cues. Motivation, influence, turnover, innovation were all treated as instances of
information processing and choice. Against this background, it was hardly surprising
that conflict was treated as a "breakdown" in the standard operating procedures
of the organization.
A second major influence on my thinking was Kenneth Boulding's Conflict and
Defense, published in the early 1960s. Boulding was an early peace advocate; his
strong distaste for war, violence and conflict in general suffused much of his work.
Although it was more explicitly value-oriented than March and Simon's treatment
of conflict, Boulding's analysis nevertheless reinforced the harmony bias of the
emerging conflict model.
The temper of the times surely must also have influenced how I saw conflict.
As a member of the so-called "silent generation", whose required reading was
Whyte's The Organization Man, I matured during the peaceful and apathetic 1950s
of the Eisenhower presidency. In the preceding 25 years we had been through
a depression, serious labor unrest, a world war and major "police action" in Korea.
Although the cold war and McCarthyism hung over us and the civil rights movement
was just beginning to gain momentum, the general temper of the times was
relatively placid from 1953 until 1963 (the ending marked for me was Kennedy's
assassination). None of the turmoil of the late 1960s and the 1970s had begun
to be evident during what I now see was merely a tranquil interlude, a temporary
calm between storms. The central institutions of the society were still, by and
large, seen as legitimate.
And yet as I worked on the ideas that grew into that 1967 paper, I must have
(unconsciously perhaps) had to reconcile the growing social unrest and challenges
to authority of the middle 1960s with the bias toward harmony and cooperation
that I drew from the literature and from maturing during the post-war period of
relative peace and stability. Conflict had to be built into any model of social behavior,
even if only as a ripple on an otherwise calm pond. Besides, Herb Simon, Dick
Cyert and especially Jim March had conditioned me as a graduate student to look
for the dark side of organizational rationality. Wherever there was a pretense of
cooperation, it must be paired with competition and conflict; things were never
as simple or as good as they seemed.
Journal of So what emerged from all of this was a model of an organization that functioned
Organizational well most of the time, but not all of the time. A fundamentally cooperative set
Change of relationships, negotiated as part of the process of forming the organization,
Management misfired occasionally because of human failings — selfishness, jealousy, empire
building, failures of communication and limitations on cognitive capacities lead to
2,2 conflict. These episodes of conflict had a structure, and because they had a structure
they could be diagnosed and controlled, and therefore the relationships and order
96 could be preserved over the long run. Conflict was not only episodic, but benign.
This vision of conflict obviously appealed to many people. The paper has been
widely reprinted and widely cited. It has been called a "classic". It is curious
that the model has never, to my knowledge, been rigorously tested, not even in
my own dissertation. Truly reliable and valid measures of the key variables have
not even been developed. I can only conclude that people liked the image of conflict
as structured, benign, and episodic so much that they didn't want to risk having
the model proved wrong by mere data. Models that seem to order the world are
comforting. Why rock the boat?