Journal of Organizational Change Management

Reflections on Organizational Conflict

Louis R. Pondy,
Article information:
To cite this document:
Louis R. Pondy, (1989) "Reflections on Organizational Conflict", Journal of Organizational Change
Management, Vol. 2 Issue: 2, pp.94-98, doi: 10.1108/EUM0000000001185
Permanent link to this document:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000001185
Downloaded on: 18 May 2017, At: 00:04 (PT)
References: this document contains references to 0 other documents.
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

To copy this document: permissions@emeraldinsight.com

The fulltext of this document has been downloaded 659 times since 2006*
Users who downloaded this article also downloaded:
(2002),"TOWARD A THEORY OF MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL CONFLICT", International Journal
of Conflict Management, Vol. 13 Iss 3 pp. 206-235 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/eb022874
(2014),"Leadership styles: relationship with conflict management styles", International Journal of
Conflict Management, Vol. 25 Iss 3 pp. 214-225 http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/IJCMA-12-2012-0091

Access to this document was granted through an Emerald subscription provided by emerald-
srm:191537 []
For Authors
If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald
for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission
guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information.
About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.com
Emerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company
manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well
as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.
Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the
Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for
digital archive preservation.

*Related content and download information correct at time of download.

 Journal of
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
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

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
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

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
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

the model proved wrong by mere data. Models that seem to order the world are
comforting. Why rock the boat?

Re-evaluation of the Model

In the 20 years since Ifinishedthat paper, much has happened to change my view
of organizational conflict, and indeed of the very nature of organizations. I do not
wish to go into detail here about 20 years' worth of observations and first-hand
experiences, except to say that I now believe my 1967 model to be flawed in a
fundamental way. And I would like to propose an alternative model that I believe
to be closer to the realities of organizational life.
The central flaw in the 1967 model is, I believe, the assumption that organizations
are cooperative, purposive systems which occasionally experience conflicts or
breakdowns in cooperation. That may sound like a startling assertion that
contradicts the very definition of an organization, but I believe it is the key to
understanding organizational conflict as I have experienced and observed it for
20 years.
Cooperation is too fragile and fleeting, purposiveness is too elusive, conflict
is too frequently and too intensely directed at the very foundation of relationships
for a model of benign, episodic conflict to be a valid representation of normal reality.
Like the Ptolemaic model of the universe, my 1967 model of conflict could be right
in detail and yet wildly wrong in its most basic assertion; empiricalfit,as Copernicus
proved, is no guarantee of the truth of the underlying image.
So, what is the alternative model? Let me suggest that an organization is precisely
the opposite of the cooperative system. Think of an organization as a means for
internalizing conflicts, for bringing them within a bounded structure so that they
can be confronted and acted out. Suppose that we treat organizations as arenas
for staging conflicts, and managers both as fight promoters who organize bouts
and as referees who regulate them. Far from being a "breakdown" in the system,
conflict in this alternative model is the very essence of what an organization is.
If conflict isn't happening, then the organization has no reason for being.
Rather than treating conflict as an occasional outcropping against a background
of cooperation, the alternative model of conflict treats cooperation as an occasional
 outcropping, as a side-effect of the strategic pursuit of conflict. That is, what needs Reflections on
to be explained is not the presence of conflict, but the presence of cooperation! Organizational
Perhaps we need a model that describes the dynamics of an episode of cooperation Conflict
that occurs in the midst of an on-going conflict relationship.
Now this proposal may be a bit extreme, and too much of a reversal of the usual
way of thinking about conflict, but let me continue to press the argument,
recognizing that I will probably have to back off at some point to a middle ground
between the 1967 model and this alternative model of the organization as a pure 97
conflict system.
Critics of the pure conflict system model will doubtless argue that harmony and
cooperation do occur within organizations, perhaps even more than occasionally.
Surely that obvious fact invalidates the alternative model. And yet we might ask
who in the organization typically argues on behalf of harmony and cooperation,
and who sets the terms of the cooperation? In most organizations it is the "in-
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

group", the "establishment" that is the strongest supporter of cooperation . . .

on their terms, of course. Thus, in the pure conflict system model, admonitions
of harmony will be treated as merely one gambit employed by the in-group in its
on-going conflicts with the rank andfileof the organization. It is no surprise that
Chester Barnard, president of the New Jersey Telephone Company, should have
been the most eloquent advocate of treating organizations as "cooperative systems".
The pure conflict system model also helps to explain March's analysis of organized
anarchies and garbage-can decision processes. If organizations are arenas for
internalizing and staging conflicts, then we would expect organizations that exist
in conflict-rich environments to exhibit organized anarchy properties in their internal
structures. (For example, the antagonists of South Africa's apartheid policy have
seized on universities as arenas for staging that conflict.) Note that the model
we are developing does not propose that conflicts are resolved; indeed, I shall
argue momentarily that a pure conflict system acts so as to perpetuate conflicts
without resolving them. This helps to explain why in garbage-can situations
decisions get made without problems being solved. That syndrome is exceptional
only within a model of the organization as a pure conflict system; such garbage-
can processes are precisely what we would expect.
Let us return to the key point mentioned earlier, that the system acts so as
to perpetuate conflicts. Why might this be so? Several scholars, the most persistent
and prominent being Karl Weick, have observed that organizations consist of
numerous pairs of opposing tendencies (e.g. risk-taking and risk-avoiding, creativity
and efficiency). If there were no active conflicts within these pairs, then one of
the polar extremes would gradually become dominant in each case, the diversity
of behavioral repertoires available to the organization would diminish, the
organization would lose its capacity for adaptation in the face of environmental
change, and it would run a high risk of eventual failure. Thus, within the alternative
model, conflict is not only functional for the organization, it is essential to its very
existence.
This insight leads to the prediction that long-lasting organizations are those that
have institutionalized conflict and diversity within the fabric of the organization,
such as legislative bodies and universities. It is not surprising to recall, therefore,
 Journal of that the 66 oldest institutions in Western civilization consist of four parliaments
Organizational and 62 universities.
Change
Management Conclusion
2,2 If we shift from a descriptive to a prescriptive mode of analysis for a moment,
we are led to the conclusion that the normative aim of managing an organization-
qua-conflict-system is to stage the right conflict episodes, with the right conflicting
98 parties, over the right issues, operating under the right ground rules. This is
obviously a radically different view of the functions of managers and leaders than
follows from the organization as a cooperative system.
This model of a pure conflict system obviously needs to be developed in greater
detail. It is not clear whether it is "testable" in any normal sense, although we
have already suggested two testable theorems that follow from the model. It would
be a mistake to try to test the model in any direct way. The purpose of the model,
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

like any model of theory, is to draw attention to previously unrecognized phenomena

and processes, and to change the very way we think about or look at familiar
phenomena. In this latter sense, the model may already have helped us to
reconceptualize the manager as an "orchestrator" of conflicts, and to recognize
the essential role that conflict plays in balancing opposing tendencies and preserving
diversity.
Let me end with a confession. Since I wrote the 1967 piece for ASQ, I have
tried for 20 years to say something new and novel about organizational conflict,
to live up to my press clippings. I could not. Whatever I had to say, operating
out of the old paradigm, I seemed to have said in the 1967 paper. That is largely
why I went on to other research topics. But for the lastfiveyears, I have been
rubbing my own nose in the dirt as the Head of a fairly large academic department,
experiencing conflicts (lots of them) first hand. I have not had much time to think
academic thoughts, only to experience whatever managers experience as they
go about their work. But in writing this reflection, I have had the joy once again
of birthing a new idea when I least expected to. And I want to thank Roy Lewicki
for staging this confrontation of ideas, old and new, and for encouraging me and
the other speakers to retrace our steps along forgotten paths and in the process
to discover some new territory that we missed the first time through.
 This article has been cited by:

1. David L. Cahill, Thomas J. Goldsby, A. Michael Knemeyer, Carl Marcus Wallenburg.

2010. CUSTOMER LOYALTY IN LOGISTICS OUTSOURCING RELATIONSHIPS: AN
EXAMINATION OF THE MODERATING EFFECTS OF CONFLICT FREQUENCY. Journal
of Business Logistics 31:2, 253-277. [CrossRef]
2. James SpeakmanIESEG School of Management, Catholic University of Lille, Lille, France Lynette
RyalsCranfield School of Management, Cranfield University, Cranfield, UK. 2010. A reevaluation of
conflict theory for the management of multiple, simultaneous conflict episodes. International Journal
of Conflict Management 21:2, 186-201. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
3. Christian Schmitz, Tillmann Wagner. 2007. Satisfaction in International Marketing Channels.
Journal of Marketing Channels 14:4, 5-39. [CrossRef]
4. Michael F. DiPaolaSchool of Education, The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg,
USA Wayne K. HoyCollege of Education, The Ohio State University, Colombus, USA.
2001. Formalization, conflict, and change: constructive and destructive consequences in schools.
International Journal of Educational Management 15:5, 238-244. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
Downloaded by Macquarie University At 00:04 18 May 2017 (PT)

5. Linda L. PutnamTexas A & M University. 1994. PRODUCTIVE CONFLICT: NEGOTIATION

AS IMPLICIT COORDINATION. International Journal of Conflict Management 5:3, 284-298.
[Abstract] [PDF]
6. Farhad AnalouiDevelopment and Project Planning Centre, University of Bradford Andrew
KakabadseSchool of Management, Cranfield Institute of Technology, Cranfield, UK. 1993.
Industrial Conflict and Its Expressions. Employee Relations 15:1, 46-62. [Abstract] [PDF]