THE PROCESSING OF CONFLICT IN ORGANIZATIONAL GROUPS: A Case Study in a Greek Industrial Company Maria Simosi Thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Social Psychology London School of Economics and Political Science University of London August 1997 UMI Number: U109756 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U109756 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 'Th b s z s G 1177 To my parents, Giannis and Eleni. Abstract The purpose of the research was to investigate the way in which employees in two departments of a Greek industrial company resolved conflict situations encountered in the context of their department. The premises are that (a) the positive effects of conflict for the organization are related to the way in which it is resolved; (b) the investigation of the phenomenon of conflict resolution necessitates the examination of employees' conflict handling behaviour during a conflict episode, as well as of their representation of the particular episode; (c) the bureaucratic culture of the organization and the wider social culture determine the conditions within which employees represent and deal with conflict situations. The research used a single case design to develop new ways to model the conflict resolution process. The use of open-ended interviews constituted the methods of data collection. Employees from two departments (Research/Design and Supplies) of the organization were selected. The analysis of data in the first part of the thesis led to the development of a net model, indicating patterns of conflict handling behaviour during any conflict episode; the generic structure of the net model, which was found to be common to both departments, was discussed in the light of Greek culture, as well as of the bureaucratic practices of that particular organization. On the basis of this analysis, a further analysis was made of the data relating to those nodes of the net model where employees were found to be involved in a decision making process. The methodology selected enabled the representation of the process of the conflict management problem by organizational members. The basic assumption incorporated within this methodology is that the conflict management problem can be represented in more than one way. The identification, via employees' discourse, of the way in which conflict situations are conceptualized in the context of the two departments, indicated how this representation relates to the wider social and organizational nexus within which it is embedded. The contribution of this study lies in identifying the conflict resolution structures and processes within two departments of the organization studied and, to a certain extent, the wider organization, while offering an insight into how this organization shapes the way in which conflict situations are processed by organizational members, using their own discourse. Acknowledgments During the four years of this research, I was fortunate to receive an abundance of guidance and support from a number of people to whom I am immensively grateful. First, I would like to express my appreciation to my supervisor, Professor Patrick Humphreys, for his scientific insight and continuous encouragement throughout my research project. I also wish to express my deep gratitude to Professor Robert Farr who, as a member of the thesis committee, provided his perceptive criticism throughout this research, and especially on the last draft of this thesis. In addition, I wish to express my gratitude and appreciation to Dr. Athena Marouda-Chatzoulis for all those hours of stimulating conversation and of invaluable support throughout. A special thank you goes to Dr. Maria Pirounaki-Lioni whose support during the empirical study was invaluable. A special thank you goes to Dr. Peter Allen, whose understanding as my employer at the University of Surrey during the last year of this thesis, has enabled me to complete this research without major delay. My compliments also go to Professor Aristotelis Kantas for his guidance in the early stages of this research. I would also like to extend my appreciation to Dr. Cathy Campbell for her intellectual advice. For the inter-coder reliability test in the first part of the thesis, I am grateful to Miltos Liakopoulos. My compliments also go to Vanessa Cragoe for her help and kindness through these four years; Steve Bennett has also helped in averting any potential computer crisis. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Social Psychology Department at the London School of Economics, the conversations with whom - especially in the Beavers' - provided a rich environment for the expression of diversity. Finally, I would like to acknowledge and thank the 26 employees who participated in my empirical research and volunteered to share their experiences with me. For three and a half years of financial sponsorship, I am indebted to the Greek State Scholarships Foundation. During the four years of this research, there are still vivid to me a number of times, during which I was optimistic and enthusiastic, and others, during which I despaired of there being any end to this lonely journey called ' scientific research’. All these different phases, which probably sound familiar to anyone who has made the same 'journey' - and which, in my case, would often alternate in sequences of days and, sometimes hours - further intrigued my patience and determination to complete this project; these qualities enabled me to resolve some of my 'inner conflicts’ and to make it to this point. In the meantime, I am aware that this project owes much of its existence to the encouragement and support of a few people who will always occupy a special place in my heart. Among this precious handful of people, I would like first to express my gratitude to my family for their enduring support in all respects. Hector Santana, Anna Athanasopoulou and Razmik Panossian are parts of the best that life in London has offered me; in them, I found friendship and support, which enabled me to keep things in perspective. I also wish to thank the people who, even though they did not share my daily experiences in London, were directly affected by my emotional upheavals and 'inner conflicts'; these people have been a source of constant strength and, in their own way, they were with me throughout this process. Most of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Lucia Garcia for her friendship, and thus invaluable support during the entire period of research. With her help, I learned how to find the courage to resolve conflicts without fighting over them. v CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER Is APPROACHING CONFLICT AS A 6 PROCESS 1.1. Overview 6 1.2. Defining the Conflict Problem- A Social Psychological 6 Perspective 1.2.1. The Phenomenological Nature of Conflict 7 1.2.2. The Interactive Nature of Conflict 8 1.2.3. The Contextual Nature of Conflict - Organizational 9 Conflict 1.3. Conflict within Organizational Groups 10 1.3.1. Organizational Bureaucracies 12 1.4. Conflict Research and Organization Theory 13 1.5. Conflict Solution or Conflict Resolution? 15 1.6 Approaching Conflict as a Process - The Notion of Conflict 16 Episode 1.7. The Dynamic Nature of the Conflict Episode - Visible 18 Behaviour and Internal Processes 1.8. Studying the Process of Conflict Resolution - The Aim of this 21 Study 1.9. Summary 24 PART I - THE PROCESS OF CONFLICT HANDLING BEHAVIOUR CHAPTER 2: RESEARCH ON CONFLICT HANDLING 26 BEHAVIOUR - A REVIEW 2.1. Overview 26 2.2. Developments in Research on Conflict Behaviour - A 26 Historical Review 2.2.1. Experimental Research on Negotiation Behaviour 26 2.2.2. Field Research on Conflict Behaviour 31 2.3. Definition of Conflict Handling Strategies 34 2.4. Conflict Handling Practices beyond the Dyadic Level 37 2.5. Models of Conflict Behaviour 38 2.5.1. Structural Models of Conflict Behaviour 38 2.5.1.1. The Dispositional Approach to Conflict 38 Behaviour 2.5.1.2. The Situational Approach to Conflict 40 Behaviour 2.5.1.3. Need to Study the Evolutionary Nature 41 of Behaviour within a Conflict Episode - Critique of the Structural Models 2.5.2. Process Models of Conflict Behaviour 43 2.5.2.1. Phase Analysis 43 2.5.2.2. Escalatory Models of Conflict 46 Behaviour 2.6. Conflict Behaviour in the Organizational Context 51 2.7. Developing a Process Model for Conflict Handling Behaviour 53 - Main Characteristics 2.8. Summary and Overview of the next Chapter 54 CHAPTER 3: ON THE METHODOLOGY 56 3.1. Overview 56 3.2 The Use of Accounts for the Investigation of Conflict 57 Resolution 3.3. Argumentation Analysis 60 3.3.1. Toulmin’s Layout of Argument Structure 64 3.3.1.1. The Problematic Related to the 69 Application of Toulmin’s framework in Practice 3.4. Examing Accounts of Conflict Episodes from Employees of 78 One Particular Organization - The Choice of a Case Study Approach 3.4.1. Focusing on One Organizational Setting- The 81 Paradigm of Organizations as Cultures 3.5. Conducting Open-ended Interviews 85 3.6. Establishing the Quality of the Present Empirical Study 87 3.7. Using Accounts as a Means of Modelling Employees’ Conflict 91 Handling Behaviour and Conflict Management Process 3.8.