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Ref lec t ions on Organiza t iona l

Conflictby

Louis R. PondyUniversity of Illinois at Urban a-Cham paign, USA

The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the analysis of organizational conflictthat I presented in my 1967 Administrative Science Quarterly paper, "OrganizationalConflict: Concepts and Models".

My 1967 conflict model was right for its time. It presented conflict as an

aberration, as a breakdown in standard processes, as a temporary outbreak oroutcropping in the otherwise smooth flow of a stable and cooperative set ofrelationships that made up an organization.

Admittedly, conflict was presented as inevitable because of the inherentdifferences in perceptions and goals of the organization members. And conflictwas even depicted as functional, provided that it didn't threaten the very basisof the relationship, because constructive conflict might move the organization tonew heights of creativity and innovation and competitive energy.

But despite the inevitability and functionality of conflict, it was still interpretedas something that happened to the relationship, something that arose out of latentdifferences, or out of competition for scarce resources, or out of threats to

autonomy needs, all necessary features of formal organizations. It was seen tosurface in relationships as feelings and perceptions and behavioral manifestations.And such episodes or outbreaks of conflict were pictured as leaving behind anaftermath of misperceptions and hard feelings which formed the seed and nucleusof subsequent conflicts.

With proper care, the worst conflicts could be avoided by proper organizationdesign, or by proper training of members to hold similar perceptions and goals,or as a last resort to decouple conflicting parties by reducing interdependenciesbetween them. Those conflicts that did arise could nevertheless be preventedfrom escalating, according to the model, by skillful use of conflict resolution

techniques. The underlying relationship could be preserved as a dynamic andhomeostatic equilibrium, straining toward but never quite reaching perfect harmony,despite its being subject to the unending waves of conflict episodes.

Within the model, the on-going relationship itself, and the assumptionsundergirding it, were not subject to question or attack or redefinition. The useof raw power or of violence for redressing grievances or for altering the fundamentalnature of the relationship played little or no role in the model. Power, violence,dissolution or revolution might occur between nations, or gangs, or social classes,or within troubled families, but not within those islands of sanity and purposivenesscalled formal organizations. And even the extreme forms of conflict that mightoccur within other types of social systems were seen as those systems gone

haywire.



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But above all, the basic image of organizations in which the model was embeddedwas that of what Chester Barnard, nearly thirty years earlier, had called acooperative system. And if organizations are "cooperative systems", the occurrence

of conflict must be a malfunction of some kind, albeit inevitable and occasionallyfunctional.

Influences on My ThinkingMy thinking on conflict was heavily influenced by March and Simon's Organizations,which was published in 1958, only about four years before I began the readingand thinking that eventually led up to the 1967 ASQ paper. Although both Marchand Simon were trained as political scientists and therefore used to thinking aboutpower and conflict, the implicit root metaphor that ran throughout Organizationswas the electronic computer, then only a few years old and still a fresh and powerfulmetaphor. Organizations were treated as giant information processing and decision

making machines, with preprogrammed subroutines to be evoked by appropriatecues. Motivation, influence, turnover, innovation were all treated as instances ofinformation processing and choice. Against this background, it was hardly surprisingthat conflict was treated as a "breakdown" in the standard operating proceduresof the organization.

A second major influence on my thinking was Kenneth Boulding's Conflict andDefense, published in the early 1960s. Boulding was an early peace advocate; hisstrong distaste for war, violence and conflict in general suffused much of his work.Although it was more explicitly value-oriented than March and Simon's treatmentof conflict, Boulding's analysis nevertheless reinforced the harmony bias of the

emerging conflict model.The temper of the times surely must also have influenced how I saw conflict.As a member of the so-called "silent generation", whose required reading wasWhyte's The Organization Man, I matured during the peaceful and apathetic 1950sof the Eisenhower presidency. In the preceding 25 years we had been througha depression, serious labor unrest, a world war and major "police action" in Korea.Although the cold war and McCarthyism hung over us and the civil rights movementwas just beginning to gain momentum, the general temper of the times wasrelatively placid from 1953 until 1963 (the ending marked for me was Kennedy'sassassination). None of the turmoil of the late 1960s and the 1970s had begunto be evident during what I now see was merely a tranquil interlude, a temporary

calm between storms. The central institutions of the society were still, by andlarge, seen as legitimate.

And yet as I worked on the ideas that grew into that 1967 paper, I must have(unconsciously perhaps) had to reconcile the growing social unrest and challengesto authority of the middle 1960s with the bias toward harmony and cooperationthat I drew from the literature and from maturing during the post-war period ofrelative peace and stability. Conflict had to be built into any model of social behavior,even if only as a ripple on an otherwise calm pond. Besides, Herb Simon, DickCyert and especially Jim M arch had conditioned me as a graduate student to lookfor the dark side of organizational rationality. Wherever there was a pretense ofcooperation, it must be paired with competition and conflict; things were never

as simple or as good as they seemed.



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So what em erged from all of this was a model of an organization that functionedwell most of the time, but not all of the time. A fundamentally cooperative setof relationships, negotiated as part of the process of forming the organization,

misfired occasionally because of human failings — selfishness, jealousy, empirebuilding, failures of communication and limitations on cognitive capacities lead toconflict. These episodes of conflict had a structure, and because they had a structurethey could be diagnosed and controlled, and therefore the relationships and ordercould be preserved over the long run. Conflict was not only episodic, but benign.

This vision of conflict obviously appealed to many people. The paper has beenwidely reprinted and widely cited. It has been called a "classic". It is curiousthat the model has never, to my knowledge, been rigorously tested, not even inmy own dissertation . Truly reliable and valid measures of the key variables havenot even been developed. I can only conclude that people liked the image of conflictas structured, benign, and episodic so much that they didn't want to risk havingthe model proved wrong by mere data. Models that seem to order the world arecomforting. Why rock the boat?

Re-evaluation of the ModelIn the 20 years since I finished hat paper, much has happened to change my viewof organizational conflict, and indeed of the very nature of organizations. I do notwish to go into detail here about 20 years' worth of observations and first-handexperiences, except to say that I now believe my 1967 model to be flawed in afundamental way. And I would like to propose an alternative model that I believeto be closer to the realities of organizational life.

The central flaw in the 1967 model is, I believe, the assumption that organizationsare cooperative, purposive systems which occasionally experience conflicts orbreakdowns in cooperation. That may sound like a startling assertion thatcontradicts the very definition of an organization, but I believe it is the key tounderstanding organizational conflict as I have experienced and observed it for20 years.

Cooperation is too fragile and fleeting, purposiveness is too elusive, conflictis too frequently and too intensely directed at the very foundation of relationshipsfor a model of benign, episodic conflict to be a valid representation of normal reality.Like the Ptolemaic model of the universe, my 1967 model of conflict could be right

in detail and yet wildly wrong in its most basic assertion; empirical fit, as Copernicusproved, is no guarantee of the truth of the underlying image.So, what is the alternative model? Let me suggest that an organization is precisely

the opposite of the cooperative system. Think of an organization as a means forinternalizing conflicts, for bringing them within a bounded structure so that theycan be confronted and acted out. Suppose that we treat organizations as arenasfor staging conflicts, and managers both as fight promoters who organize boutsand as referees who regulate them. Far from being a "breakdow n" in the system,conflict in this alternative model is the very essence of what an organization is.If conflict isn't happening, then the organization has no reason for being.

Rather than treating conflict as an occasional outcropping against a background

of cooperation, the alternative model of conflict treats cooperation as an occasional



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outcropping, as a side-effect of the strategic pursuit of conflict. That is, what needsto be explained is not the presence of conflict, but the presence of cooperation!Perhaps we need a model that describes the dynamics of an episode of cooperation

that occurs in the midst of an on-going conflict relationship.Now this proposal may be a bit extrem e, and too much of a reversal of the usual

way of thinking about conflict, but let me continue to press the argument,recognizing that I will probably have to back off at some point to a middle groundbetween the 1967 model and this alternative model of the organization as a pureconflict system.

Critics of the pure conflict system model will doubtless argue that harmony andcooperation do occur within organizations, perhaps even more than occasionally.Surely that obvious fact invalidates the alternative model. And yet we might askwho in the organization typically argues on behalf of harmony and cooperation,

and who sets the terms of the cooperation? In most organizations it is the "in-group", the "establishm ent" that is the strongest supporter of cooperation . . .on their terms, of course. Thus, in the pure conflict system model, admonitionsof harmony will be treated as merely one gambit employed by the in-group in itson-going conflicts with the rank and file of the organization. It is no surprise thatChester Barnard, president of the New Jersey Telephone Company, should havebeen the most eloquent advocate of treating organizations as "cooperative systems".

The pure conflict system model also helps to explain March's analysis of organizedanarchies and garbage-can decision processes. If organizations are arenas forinternalizing and staging conflicts, then we would expect organizations that existin conflict-rich environments to exhibit organized anarchy properties in their internal

structures. (For example, the antagonists of South Africa's apartheid policy haveseized on universities as arenas for staging that conflict.) Note that the modelwe are developing does not propose that conflicts are resolved; indeed, I shallargue momentarily that a pure conflict system acts so as to perpetuate conflictswithout resolving them. This helps to explain why in garbage-can situationsdecisions get made without problems being solved. That syndrome is exceptionalonly within a model of the organization as a pure conflict system; such garbage-can processes are precisely what we would expect.

Let us return to the key point mentioned earlier, that the system acts so asto perpetuate conflicts. Why might this be so? Several scholars, the most persistent

and prominent being Karl Weick, have observed that organizations consist ofnumerous pairs of opposing tendencies (e.g. risk-taking and risk-avoiding, creativityand efficiency). If there were no active conflicts within these pairs, then one ofthe polar extremes would gradually become dominant in each case, the diversityof behavioral repertoires available to the organization would diminish, theorganization would lose its capacity for adaptation in the face of environmentalchange, and it would run a high risk of eventual failure. Thus, within the alternativemodel, conflict is not only functional for the organization, it is essential to its veryexistence.

This insight leads to the prediction that long-lasting organizations a re those thathave institutionalized conflict and diversity within the fabric of the organization,such as legislative bodies and universities. It is not surprising to recall, therefore,



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that the 66 oldest institutions in Western civilization consist of four parliamentsand 62 universities.

ConclusionIf we shift from a descriptive to a prescriptive mode of analysis for a moment,we are led to the conclusion that the normative aim of managing an organization-qua-conflict-system is to stage the right conflict episodes, with the right conflictingparties, over the right issues, operating under the right ground rules. This isobviously a radically different view of the functions of managers and leaders thanfollows from the organization as a cooperative system.

This model of a pure conflict system obviously needs to be developed in greaterdetail. It is not clear whether it is "testable" in any normal sense, although wehave already suggested two testable theorems that follow from the model. It wouldbe a mistake to try to test the model in any direct way. The purpose of the model,like any model of theory, is to draw attention to previously unrecognized phenomenaand processes, and to change the very way we think about or look at familiarphenomena. In this latter sense, the model may already have helped us toreconceptualize the manager as an "orchestrator" of conflicts, and to recognizethe essential role that conflict plays in balancing opposing tendencies and preservingdiversity.

Let me end with a confession. Since I wrote the 1967 piece for ASQ, I havetried for 20 years to say something new and novel about organizational conflict,to live up to my press clippings. I could not. Whatever I had to say, operatingout of the old paradigm, I seemed to have said in the 1967 paper. That is largely

why I went on to other research topics. But for the last five years, I have beenrubbing my own nose in the dirt as the Head of a fairly large academic department,experiencing conflicts (lots of them) first hand. I have not had much time to thinkacademic thoughts, only to experience whatever managers experience as theygo about their work. But in writing this reflection, I have had the joy once againof birthing a new idea when I least expected to. And I want to thank Roy Lewickifor staging this confrontation of ideas, old and new, and for encouraging me andthe other speakers to retrace our steps along forgotten paths and in the processto discover some new territory that we missed the first time through.

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