Sources of conflict
Contents |
Abstract
Conflicts are inevitable in projects. Conflicts can lead to decreasing team performance and have a negative effect on the project's outcome if not managed well.
Therefore, it is interesting to explore the sources of conflicts to understand better how to prevent and/or solve conflicts optimally. There is a lot of literature on conflict management including different reasons for conflicts to occur. This article focuses on three overall sources of conflict: team, task, and, organization since these aspects seem to recur throughout several works of literature.
Team antecedents: size, composition, and diversity
Task antecedents: complexity and scope
Organizational antecedents: norms and strategies [1]
The intensity of conflicts for a project varies with the phases of the project's life cycle, which means various sources will vary along this life cycle. [2] As there are many different sources of conflicts, there will be multiple solutions to solve the conflicts. However, under some circumstances, conflicts can be beneficial for a project. Therefore, the project manager must understand how and when conflicts should be encouraged, while others should be resolved as quickly as possible.
Characteristics of conflict
Definition of conflict
Are conflicts beneficial or detrimental?
Source of conflicts
Three basic sets of antecedents: team, task and organization
Role conflicts
a division of authority
the technical complexity of the project
internal organizational politics
project life cycle
Type of conflicts
Cognitive (task) conflict and affective (emotional) conflict
The effects on project management and outcome
Applications
Understand the source of conflict to solve and prevent it from happening (escalating)
Utilizing conflict management in practice
Limitations
A lot of theories on reasons for conflicts to occur (only elaborated few aspects)
Different kinds of projects (in complexity, etc.) and organizational factors (organizational structure)
Annotated bibliography
Further reading
More aspects to explore
References
- ↑ Mooney A.C., Holahan P.J., Amason A.C., Don't take it personally: Exploring cognitive conflict as a mediator of affective conflict., (2017), Journal of Management Studies Volume 44, Issue 5, Pages 733 - 758
- ↑ Robert E. Jones, Richard F. Deckro, The social psychology of project management conflict., (1993) European Journal of Operational Research, Volume 64, Issue 2, Pages 216-228, ISSN 0377-2217, https://doi.org/10.1016/0377-2217(93)90178-P.
