The Role of Organizational Culture on Informal Conflict Management

Abstract

Many researchers and scholars would without hesitation justify the role of formal processes to manage the conflict in the workplace. The conflict process is greatly influenced by organizational culture. A number of researchers have explored the influences of organizational culture on the different ways of handling conflict. But the organizational culture and conflict management research has often ignored the examination of the impact and implications of culture on informal conflict management in organizations. In this article we take a narrower approach that focuses on the specific domain of culture pertaining to the management of conflict. The purpose of this study was to analyze the amount and types of conflict in organizations with the aim of investigating the relationship between organizational culture and the behavioral norms used to informally manage conflict by examining the results of a survey questionnaire given to 168 employees of a Public Administration. The results indicate that there is a relationship between culture and behavioral norms. In this scenario, formal processes of conflict management become prescriptions and lose their relevance for understanding the challenges and the evolutions of conflict situations. We demonstrate that the practice of conflict management is more problematic, especially in that it brings the topic of organizational culture into the discussion of conflict theory literature.