Managing Conflict through Effective Organization Design: An Experimental Study with the Maps Design Technology

Abstract

A laboratory study was conducted to test the hypotheses that the MAPS Design Technology reduces conflict at the intrapersonal, intragroup, and intergroup levels of an organization and increases the organization's effectiveness. Assessing by questionnaire organization members' preferences for tasks and people, MAPS creates clusters of homogeneous tasks and congruent people and then assigns each cluster of people to a cluster of tasks; this represents the best possible fit between a task and a people-cluster and results in alternative organizational designs. The results suggested that the organizational designs containing clusters of congruent people generated less intragroup and intergroup conflicts than designs containing clusters of incongruent people. There were no differences in intrapersonal conflict across designs. The output of the MAPS design (congruent people-homogeneous tasks) was greater than the output of another design which involved incongruent people and heterogeneous tasks.