Conflict management styles in Hong Kong industries

Abstract

Review of literature has revealed that little research on conflict management has been conducted in Hong Kong industries despite Hong Kong being one of the world's most competitive economies, and a major commercial, financial, industrial centre. This paper examines the use of different conflict resolutions in 63 actual case studies from Hong Kong industries. Contrary to common perception and previous findings, `confrontation', as a mode of conflict resolution, is found to be more commonly used in handling conflict. And significantly, almost all of the case incidents which used the `confrontation' approach were said to have achieved positive consequences. The authors argue that this change of resolution strategy in the past decade could be due to the increasing number of Hong Kong companies adopting the matrix structure explicitly or implicitly in carrying their projects. It appears that in Hong Kong industries, the influence of the Chinese culture and traditional values in attitude, behaviour and professional practices of both engineers as well as managers, is diminishing. Although the `withdrawal' and `forcing' approaches were also being used for certain types of conflict, as revealed by some of the case studies, the consequences are often recognised to be dysfunctional to team work.