Abstract

The article focuses on conflict management and points toward new areas of theory development and research. According to authors, conflict is inevitable in organizations and that it can have important positive consequences. Most important, there is general agreement that collaborative or problem-solving behavior is not the most productive conflict-handling mode in all conflict situations. Some of the most striking differences are the criteria used to define the effectiveness of different conflict-handling modes. Judgments of the functionality of conflict-handling behaviors depend upon the outcome criteria chosen. It therefore seems crucial for the development of conflict management as a field that theorists and practitioners be explicit about the objectives they are attempting to attain and, perhaps equally important, about those outcome variables that are neglected. It may well be meaningless to talk about the general "functionality" or "effectiveness" of a given conflict mode without specifying these criteria.