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Management of conflict
Bob Dick (1987)
The management of conflict: a systematic approach to team building and mediated and unmediated conflict resolution
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Chapel Hill: Interchange (mimeo).
A 1987 revision of a 1981 paper, written to support workshops in conflict management. More details of the paper’s provenance are given in the preface.
Some of the references to earlier documents have been updated
Preface
This document
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describes fairly robust (or “do-it-yourself”) versions of teambuilding and conflict resolution. The robustness comes from a number of sources. One is the use of some techniques which keep the problem small and containable. A second is the use of a number of detailed procedures and
1. This is a living document which is often revised, and portions of which have appeared in other documents and handouts.
PAPER
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Paper 25 - 2 Robust processes — papers frameworks which makes it easier for a mediator to keep on track. An explicit problem-solving approach is used, which increases many users’ acceptance of the method. A third is the inclusion of simple communication skills training (for mediator, or those in conflict, or both) as part of the approach.
Perhaps the most important source of its robustness is the use of a procedure which more nearly resembles role negotiation than conflict resolution. This is made possible by the use of criteria to decide what information needs to be exchanged. Thus a typical session might begin as role negotiation. When the need arises, it might then become more of a relationship-oriented team building session by the addition of the extra relevant information. For more complex issues, it might respond by becoming something quite similar to the approach described by Chris Argyris in some of his writing. In this third form, it is characterised by the inclusion of information