Conflict in Organization:

A Re-Examination*
J O S E P H A. L I T T E B E B
University of Illinois

Generally, conflict in organizations is con-

demned. This article examines some of the
functions which conflict can flU and also
some of its roots. It is shown that the
roots of conflict are embedded in some of
the basic characteristics of organizations,
and hence it is to some degree inescapable.
It is also shown that conflict can have use-
ful effects in organizations. Essentially,
the article shows that conflict is a control-
lable element in organizations, and can,
therefore, be adjusted to minimize its dys-
functional and maximize its functional
characteristics.

The prevalence of conflict in organizations is only too apparent, not only

from our personal experiences but also from literature of organizational studies.^
All schools of thought on organizations have recognized that conflict exists. They
have difEered in how they looked at it. The writers of classical organization
theory viewed conflict as undesirable, detrimental to the organization. Ideally it
should not exist. Their prescription was simple. Eliminate it. This could be
done by adequate job deflnition, detailed speciflcation of relationships among
positions, careful selection of people to flU positions, and thorough training of
people once they had been assigned.^
This view of the classic organization writers paralleled the view of others
on the handling of tension within people. A fundamental position of many who
analyzed individual behavior was that individuals were motivated by a desire
for tension reduction. The prescription in both therapy and organizational
design therefore was to take steps or make arrangements which would reduce

• An earlier version of this paper was given at the Midwest Division of the Academy of
Management, April 1965, Peoria, Illinois.
' See for example: Chris Argyris, The Impact of Budgets on People (New York: The
Controllers Institute Research Foundation, 1952); Alvin Gouldner, Patterns of Industrial
Bureaucracy (Glencoe: The Free Press, 1954) ; Melville Dalton, Men Who Manage (New York:
John Wiley & Sons, 1959) ; Peter Blau, Ihe Dynamics of Bureaucraey (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1955).
'With varying degrees of explicitness these points are made by many writers. See for
example Frederick W. Taylor, Scientific Management (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947) ;
L. Urwick, The Elements of Administration (New York, Haiper & Brothers, 1943) ; James
Mooney, Principles of Organization (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1947).
178
1966 Conflict in Organization 17$

tension within individuals. More recently it has become accepted that tension is
normal, even desirable, with the thought growing that "healthy" personalities
actually seek to increase tension.^
This shift in thinking about personality has both a parallel and an impact
on the thinking about conflict in organizations. If tension is not only acceptable
but useful in individuals, then one source of individual tension, organizational
conflict, may also be not only acceptable but useful. That, within certain bounds,
conflict is acceptable and useful is the conclusion reached by a number of recent
authors.* We therefore bring conflict from the role of a condemned, to that of
a considered, variable.
While doubtless some forms and certain degrees of conflict are dysfunctional
or "unhealthy," other types, to certain degrees, are useful. The questions then
are how much conflict is functional and where are the limits beyond whicli it
becomes dysfunctional. The problem before us is therefore much more complex
than previously. At one time the ideal amount of conflict was zero and the
common decision was "eliminate it." Now the questions are what are the limits
within which conflict is useful and how does one manage conflict.

FUNCTIONS AND VARIABLES

The theme of this paper is to examine what is involved in managing conflict in
organizations, given that it has both functional and dysfunctional potentialities.
To reduce this to a manageable task, many important things will be excluded.
We will not consider intrapersonal conflicts or conflicts between a person's self
concept and the role which he occupies. Further, we will not even begin to
explore the almost completely untapped area concerned with determining the
type and degree of conflict which is functional and that which is dysfunctional.
Our approach instead will be from the point of view of examining what confiict
is and identifying the organizational elements that produce it. If we are to
manage conflict within reasonable boundaries, it is to these elements that we have
to look to flnd the levers and handles with which to do the job.

Functions of Conflict
Although the detrimental effects of conflict have been frequently cited the
advantages of conflict have received but scant attention. A number of different
functions of conflict in organizations have been identifled and discussed in the
literature. Perhaps one of the most important cited by a number of investigators'
' See for example, Gordon W. Allport, "The Trend in Motivational Theory," American
Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Vol. 23, (1953) pp. 107-119; Viktor B. Prankl, From Death Camp
to Existentialism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949); and William Wolf, "Wider Horizons in
Psychotherapy," American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 16, No. 1, January 1963, pp. 124-149.
'Dalton, op. dt.; Kenneth Boulding, Conflict Management and Organizations (Ann Arbor:
Foundation for Besearch on Human Behavior, 1961), p. 1 and Chris Argyris, Integrating ihe
Individual and the Organization (New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1964), particularly Chapter 1.
"Dalton, op. dt.; Peter Blau and William B. Scott, Formal Organizations (San Franciseo:
Chandler Publishing Company, 1962); James G. March and Herbert A. Simon, Organizations
(New York, John Wiley & Sons, 1959).
180 Academy of Management September

is that conflict initiates a search for some way to resolve or ameliorate the conflict
and therefore leads to innovation and change. It should also be noted at the same
time that conflict not only leads to a search for change but it also makes change
more acceptable, even desirable.
Closely related with the above is the observation that a conflict energizes
people to activity, sometimes just to reduce the conflict and its concurrent dis-
pleasures, at other times because the conflict gives a zest to certain activities.
Conflict within an organization can be an essential portion of a cybernetic
system. It often occurs at the point at which some other systems within the
organization are functioning inadequately and therefore calls attention to these
problem areas and generates a search for solutions or improvements. Conflict
often leads to shifts or reallocations of existing or future rewards or resources,
thereby fundamentally changing important aspects of the organization. Budget
allocation and unions-management conflicts are among many widely recognized.
It should be pointed out that conflicts between units or people on one level in
an organization will often keep them from effectively confronting units or people
at different hierarchal levels. A manager at one level may have far more influence
over subordinates if they are competing with each other than if they unite to
work against him, as we are reminded by the old political adage "divide and
conquer." We should not fail to recognize, however, that this also occurs in
reverse, that subordinates may often achieve considerable autonomy when the
superiors are in conflict and therefore have neither the time nor the energy to
expend in dominating those at a lower level.
There are doubtless other functions that conflict serves in organizations. The
point is, however, not to compile a list but to say that conflict can be of use to
organizations and that some of these uses are of great importance.

Definition of Confiict
Let us examine the organization elements which cause interperson, person-
unit and interunit conflict. First, conflict is a battle or clash involving two people
or more in opposition to each other. From our point of view, it is an inter-
personal or interunit event and involves a particular type of interaction. The
roots of this particular type of interaction reveal most about conflict. Conflict
occurs when one sees the prospect of relative deprivation resulting from the
actions of or in interacting with the other. For example, to some people, having
to take orders from a person whom they think to be in lower status would result
in their losing some of their own status and hence they would be deprived. How-
ever, the loss can be relative since conflict can occur when both parties are gaining
but one or both feel that the other may gain more. Then one or both may perceive
the outcoine as a second-best position.
Our deflnition of conflict, then, is that conflict is a type of behavior which
occurs when two or more parties are in opposition or in battle as a result of a
perceived relative deprivation from the activities of or interacting with another
person or group.
1966 Conflict in Organisation 181,

FOUR CONFLICT SITUATIONS

The organizational causes of conflict are numerous. The particular organiza-
tional elements which lead to conflict do not bring this result about directly.
Instead they create conditions which aflEect the perception and motivation of
organizational members in such a way that conflict results. There are then a set
of intervening variables which transform structural forms into behavioral out-
puts. The many organizational structures which produce conflict seem to feed
four principal types of intervening variables or organizational situations. These
are win-lose situations (or competition over position), competition over resources
or work arrangements, status incongruencies, and perpetual differences.
Win-Lose Situations
This intervening variable develops when two people or two units haye goals
which cannot exist simultaneously. Surprisingly, organizations set up many cir-
cumstances which lead to this condition. This is commonly witnessed in inspec-
tion situations. The inspector is hired to flnd errors but errors are someone else's
output. Therefore every time the inspector flnds an error justifying his position's
existence and opening the opportunity for praise and reward, someone else is
losing. The latter's output is shown to be inadequate and his rewards are en-
dangered. Formal inspection positions such as those of quality control inspectors
come to mind most readily, but it should be recognized that many staff positions
have inspection components which produce in part the conflict so frequently noted
among line and staff positions. Accounting is one type of staff work with large
inspection components.'
Inspection is one type of win-lose situation. There are others not so obvious,
however. Not long ago a major airline was faced with considerable conflict between
two of its managers at a western city. Upon investigation it was found that the
Sales Manager, in order to increase his sales volume, wanted to provide certain
services for customers. These, however, would be provided by the employees and
from the budgets of the Eamp and Services Manager. There was considerable
effort to decentralize and promote as much autonomy for individual managers as
possible and handsome bonus systems were set up on certain standards of indi-
vidual managerial performance. If the Sales Manager could increase his sales he
would have many advantages. Conversely, if the Ramp Services Manager could
keep his costs down he too would have many rewards coming to him. Hence the
problem, and the conflict; the Sales Manager could not get his bonus unless the
Eamp Services Manager were to forego some of his own. This condition, although
not always clearly recognized, exists in many organizations where reward systems
are based upon individual performances which are not independent but are very
much interdependent.

Competition over Means Utilization

In this area, conflict occurs not over goals which may be similar, but stems
from the fact that there are differing ideas as to what means are appropriate or
" March and Simon, op. dt., p. 122.
18S Academy of Management September

who will have the means. French has shown that conflicts over the means to goal
accomplishment are more disruptive of group cohesiveness than conflicts over
differing goals.''
Another common source of conflict involves shared dependence on limited
resources and scheduling problems.* Those that center on budgetary decisions,
allocation of capital resources and the efforts made by certain departments to
assure themselves that adequate supplies of scarce personnel are provided by the
personnel department are recognized and common.
Scheduling problems are often not as clearly recognized and are perhaps
more common. A common situation is cited by Whyte in a plant where a group
of women workers was asked to participate in establishing new work norms.*
As might be expected from previous studies, the standards they established were
actually above those the industrial engineering department would have provided.
However, worker-set performance standards 30-50 percent over engineering
standards, instead of being a satisfactory situation, created numerous problems.
The department following this one faced an avalanche of material which created
considerable pressure. Departments preceding this one were placed under con-
siderable pressure to produce more. Employees in these and other departments
hearing of the high earnings in the initial department complained about inequi-
ties. The engineering department felt humiliated at having so badly misjudged
workable standards. Management at several levels, seeing all these events, felt
that somehow things were out of control and that their position was being eroded.

Status Incongruency
An often neglected but extremely pervasive influence on behavior stems from
the fact that people want to know where they stand relative to others, that is,
what their status is. This might not be too much of an issue if there were but one
standard for evaluating a person. But actually there are numerous status
hierarchies and one's position is never the same on them all. Further, it is
often changing.
One set of status problems in industry arises from the impact of changing
technology. Men who entered companies years ago and rose slowly through the
ranks often feel that seniority and age justify fairly high status positions. How-
ever, they may flnd themselves superseded by younger men moved into higher
level positions because their more recent technical training better flts them to
cope with modern business problems. Working for someone younger than them-
selves and with less seniority, these men feel their status has been eroded and
often accept this with little grace.
There are many other things, however, which create status incongruencies.
For example, it is generally felt that those who give orders or initiate action for
others have higher status than those who receive the orders or have work initiated

'John E. P. French, Jr., "The Disruption and Cohesion of Groups," The Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology, Vol. 36, (1941), pp. 361-377.
' March and Simon, op. cit., p. 122.
"William Foote Whyte, Money and Motivation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955).
1966 Conflict in Organization 18S

for them. Work-flow relationships can often cause difficulties, however. Whyte
in his study of the restaurant industry found situations where waitresses or other
women could initiate activities for men by transmitting orders to them.^" In
other situations cooks would have work initiated by runners. In each case, it
appeared that low-status people were initiating work for those of higher status,
in opposition to normal expectation and much conflict arose.

Perceptual Differences
It has long been recognized that people who look at things differently often
come into conflict. In organizations, people see things differently for a variety
of reasons, among them locational factors. It is frequently observed that people
in different functional departments will tend to have different views of what is
good for the company and how things are to be done. The classic conflicts between
marketing and production over such things as delivery times, quality and lengths
of production runs are well known. People in these departments not only perform
different types of work but also interact with different publics. Marketing people
interact most frequently with people outside the company, customers and com-
petitors ; those in manufacturing interact mostly with other departments within
the company or with the union. These differences in systemic linkages and activi-
ties lead to differences in perception of considerable magnitude.^^
Hierarchal location also has an impact. The problems seen by the flrst line
supervisor, faced with the enormous pressures of day-to-day operations, are quite
different from those of the managers two and three levels above whose time per-
spectives are greater and whose pressures take a different form and come from
different quarters. The manager looking at a long-range development may not
want certain relationships established with the union. But the foreman, faced
with the fact that he must meet a shipping date at the end of the month, may
be much more prone to accept a short-term solution and worry about the future
some other time.^^
This scarcely exhausts all the intervening variables. Looking at the four,
however, one can begin to understand which types of situations might be useful,
that is, functional and which might lead to dysfunctional consequences.

FUNCTIONAL VERSUS DYSFUNCTIONAL

As pointed out earlier, conflict often leads to innovation. Innovation usually
offers some way of resolving differences so that both parties gain more in the new
arrangement than they lose.
With this in mind, it is fairly easy to see that incompatible goals are very
difficult to resolve, in fact, often impossible. Often even mediation is impossible

" William Foote Whyte, Human Relations in the Bestaurant Industry (New York: Harper
& Brothers, 1948).
" See for example, DeWitt C. Dearborn and Herbert A. Simon, "Selective Perception: A
Note on Departmental Identification of Executives," Sociometry, Vol. 21, (1958) pp. 140-144.
'" For an interesting discussion of this point see Norman H. Martin, "Differential Decisions
in the Management of an Industrial Plant," Joumai of Business, Vol. 29, (1956) pp. 249-260.
184 Academy of Management September

and the only thing that can take care of them is arbitration.^* The other solution
is to remove completely the element causing the incompatible goals. Such a solu-
tion was described by Argyris when a plant manager tried to find some way of
assigning charges for a shipment of inferior products returned by a customer.
The competition among the various foremen was fierce,. each trying to avoid
having the charges assigned to his unit. In the end the plant manager had to
assign them to general plant overhead.^*
Incompatible means leading to conflict can be reduced or eliminated by a search
for another means set more acceptable to all parties concerned. This source of
conflict seems to lead to creative resolutions far more frequently than any of the
other types and therefore can most likely lead to invention and adaptation. This
idea of finding or creating a third ground for resolving differences was an aspect
of creativity that concerned Mary Parker FoUett.^^
Status incongruencies can be energizers in the sense that they may awaken
a person to the fact that his performance and his background need improvement
in order to secure a position more compatible with the status he would like to
occupy. Not so much the source of innovation, this can be a source of motivation.
On the other hand, status incongruency can produce a destructive form of con-
flict leading to long and bitter hostility rather than changes in individual talents
or performance or advancement.
In almost any organization and certainly in large organizations, it is im-
possible for anyone to observe all the things which are relevant to the organiza-
tion ; hence, different perceptions are sure to exist. Such differences, when they
culminate in broadening the view of the opposing parties or when they bring
problems to the attention of higher individuals in the organization, may be very
valuable in detecting serious breakdowns in the overall functioning of an organi-
zation. The problem, of course, is to keep these perceptions from becoming rigid
and the conflicts from becoming fixed. This can be greatly facilitated in many
ways, such as planned position rotation, training programs, committees and
the like.
This has been an all too brief examination of how the intervening variables
can be used to determine which are sources of useful conflict and how conflict
can be managed in an organization. We still have one important topic to con-
sider, the actions or programs to be taken to manage conflict.
MANAGING CONFLICT SITUATIONS
Three basic strategies have been proposed for handling conflict situations.^^
Making the System Work
Let us consider the situation where people find themselves in what they deem
to be a situation of status incongruency. One solution would be to work with the
" Bernard M. Bass, Organizational Psychology (New York: Allyn and Bacon, 1965), p. 336.
"Argyris, op. cit., (1952).
"Metcalf and Urwick (eds.). Dynamic Administration (New York: Harper & Brothers,
1941).
" Daniel Katz, "Approaches to Managing Conflict," in Conflict Management and Organiza-
tions (Ann Arbor: Foundation for Eesearch on Human Behavior, 1961).
1966 Conflict in Organization 185

individuals to get them to accept that: Age is going to keep them from certain
types of positions, or that if they are not going to work to learn new technologies,
they cannot expect to get promoted and so on. The system essentially stays the
same but some of the elements in it are modified to make the current arrange-
ments more workable.

Developing Additional Machinery

An alternate to modifying some of the elements in the system is to alter the
system by adding or replacing elements. For example, when conflicts develop
because a low-status person is initiating action for one of higher status, the con-
flicts can be reduced in part by creating a buffer. Whyte described a situation
where runners were to write an order on a slip of paper and place it on a hook
from which the cooks could take it, thereby making the interaction less direct.^''
This reduction led to less conflict.
Changing Institutional Structure to Eliminate the Cause of the Conflict
Sometimes even modifying the system is not sufficient to reduce conflict and
a major change is required in the organization, such as creating new positions
or departments. For example, with the conflicts between the cook and runner,
one solution proposed was to have the information on orders related to the cook
by a supervisor rather than by the runner. Even though this would require the
creation of a special new supervisory position, the initiation of work would then
be more in line with the usual expectations of status differences.
These three events in sequence constitute an overall mechanism for reducing
conflict in organizations. We first try to make the system work, then try to
develop additional machinery and when all else fails restructure the basic
system.^* To go from one event to another as a "natural" process can be wasteful
and unnecessary. Our previous analysis showed that some situations can be
corrected only by the latter step and others by only the last two. Hence, by
analyzing the source of conflict, it is possible to choose the appropriate strategy
in this sequence.
CONCLUSION
The intent of this paper was to explore conflict in organizations. It is not a
single, simple, but a very complex, cluster of events. While it has detrimental
effects, it can also have very useful consequences. The assumption that conflict
was universally detrimental was consistent with earlier organizational models,
given their basic concern with stable organizations and goal maximization. The
functional possibilities of conflict become apparent in examining a system model
of organizations, for here conflict's role as a control and innovation element can
be considered.

"Whyte, (1948), op. cit. See also Elias Porter, "The Parable of the Spindle," Harvard
Business Review (May-June, 1962).
" There is a close parallel between the strategy sequence for conflict reduction proposed by
Katz and the innovation process discussed by March and Simon, op. cit.
1S6 Academy of Management Septemler

This paper has examined only those portions of conflict most directly con-
cerned with the questions of what use is conflict and how can it be managed. Even
in this area, there are critical questions of how much conflict is useful and what
forms of conflict are most useful. It has been shown that different organization
arrangements produce different competitive situations, and that the effect of
conflict depends to a considerable degree on the nature of the conflict.
It is concluded that conflict is a manageable organizational event producing
both functional and dysfunctional effects. Conflict in this light is almost com-
pletely unexplored as a topic and therefore is one on which much constructive
work can be expended.