Developing Organizational Competences for Conflict Management: The Use of the Prisoner's Dilemma in Higher Education.

Andreina Bruno,Giuseppina Dell'Aversana,Gloria Guidetti

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00376

Andreina Bruno, Giuseppina Dell'Aversana + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00376

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Abstract

Interpersonal relationship require sophisticated competences of cohabitation. However, the availability of training tools to develop conflict management skills is limited and problematic. The prisoner's dilemma game (PDG), the most widely known example of game theory, a nonzero-sum game, has been used, in higher education, to provide students with an opportunity of active learning and for understanding counterintuitive concepts. It creates a condition of emotive, moral and decisional conflict in and between agents. This paper presents a case-study in higher education in which PDG was proposed to enhance organizational competences for conflict management, according to the psychoanalytic approach to organizational studies. The study aims to explore: (1) the significant characteristics of PDG used in an affective-emotional key in higher education; (2) the learning outcomes that PDG enables to activate in the participants in relation to the development of organizational skills for conflict management. Twenty students' reflective journals were analyzed using thematic analysis. Findings indicated that PDG is perceived as a useful device in students' learning experience, which is appreciated in relation to its concreteness, intensity and debriefing phase. Learning outcomes allow new meanings about conflict, by emphasizing its defensive, automatic and interpersonal dimension. This paper contributes to the understanding of PDG as a tool to develop competences in dealing with the challenges of conflict management, since it seems to favor the overcoming of the individualistic stereotype in conflict representation by highlighting the interdependence of social interaction.

Highlights

In the organizational studies debate, conflict has been intended as a guilt, as a yoke, or as a resource
- the learning outcomes that prisoner’s dilemma game (PDG) enables to activate in the participants in relation to the development of organizational skills for conflict management
I really liked that this week ended like this (9, f) Two main themes emerged from data analysis: (a) The significant dimensions of PDG experience; (b) New meanings about conflict

Summary

Introduction

In the organizational studies debate, conflict has been intended as a guilt, as a yoke, or as a resource. In the classical perspective of organization, the conflict is understood as a sign of social malfunction, human incorrect execution and individual guilt, as it is the outcome of a bad joint between the individual and the predefined system This organizational perspective represents the conflict as not tolerable, and expected to be suppressed: in this way, it favors the reference to the individualistic stereotype in describing conflict management competences (Bruno, 2018). Conflict represents the irreducible tension between the different organizational dimensions This perspective emphasizes the need for organizational competences in staying in motion between differences (Augier and March, 2001) and, in particular, in managing conflicts (Bradley and Monda-Amaya, 2005). Conflict is a resource, because it allows to solicit the imagination, move the status quo, and activate innovation within the organization

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