The Management of Workplace Conflict: Contrasting Pathways in the HRM Literature

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/ijmr.12107
• Author: Denise Currie,Paul Teague,Bill Roche,Tom Gormley
• Published date: 01 October 2017
• Date: 01 October 2017

International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 19, 492–509 (2017)

DOI: 10.1111/ijmr.12107

The Management of Workplace Conflict:

Contrasting Pathways in the HRM

Literature

Denise Currie,1Tom Go r m ley ,2Bill Roche3and Paul Teague1

1Queen’s University Management School, 25 University Square, Queen’sUniversity Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN,

Northern Ireland, 2UCD Industrial Relations and HRM, Graduate School of Business, Dublin,

Ireland, and 3University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Corresponding author email: p.teague@qub.ac.uk

This paper reviews the human resourcemanagement literature on the management of

workplace conflict. It suggests that workplace conflict is commonly viewed in the liter-

ature as a symptom of management failure: the notion that conflict maybe intrinsic to

the nature of work because employeesand managers have hard-to-reconcile competing

interests is given short-shrift. At the same time, the paper identifies important differ-

ences in the literature, which the authors call ‘pathways’, about the best methods to

manage problems at the workplace. It is argued that fourcontrasting pathways can be

detected in the literature with regardto how organizations approach workplace conflict

management practices. Each pathway is examined fully and their respective strengths

and weaknesses are assessed.

Introduction

How workplace conflict is understood and how it is

managed has changed over the past two decades. In

the heydayof collective industrial relations, conflict at

work was commonly viewed as something similar to

the arrival of bad weather,not par ticularlywelcomed,

but inevitable nonetheless. This phlegmatic approach

to workplace conflict was held by trade union repre-

sentatives and personnel managers alike; some even

viewed the occasional industrial dispute as almost

cathartic, as it cleansed bad feelings between manage-

ment and the workforce (Metcalf and Milner 1991).

This view has been seriously challenged in recent

times as a result of multiple factors, one of which

is the rise of human resource management (HRM).

In its endeavours to recast the professional identity

of people management, to make it part of mainstream

management, HRM views workplaceconflict through

a quite different cognitive lens: instead of adopting a

phlegmatic approach to conflict at work, the vast bulk

of HRM literature considers workplace conflict in an

entirely negative light: a symptom of managerial fail-

ure that needs to be avoided, as it distracts from the

core goal of creating high-performance organizations.

This paper locates the genesis of this new perspec-

tive on workplace conflict in changes in the political

economy of advanced economies. Although, there is

now a broad consensus in the HRM literature that

workplace conflict is bad for organizations, no sin-

gular view has emerged about how problems at work

should be managed. Even among those who argue

that conflict management practices inside organiza-

tions need upgrading, a variety of views exist about

the nature of the innovations that should be diffused.

The purpose of this paper is to assess how workplace

conflict management is treated in the HRM litera-

ture. At the outset, we should say that this review is

more or less confined to the HRM literature on the

topic. We do not consider in any systematic manner

the abundant studies of work and conflict completed

by labour process or organizational justice scholars

in the organizational studies field. Similarly, we do

not seek to marshal in any thoroughgoing manner the

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The Management of Workplace Conflict 493

vast industrial relations literature on workplace con-

flict. While we acknowledge that important and rich

research has been done in these respective areas, it

would have been much too ambitious to review all

these fields in one paper. More positively, we feel that

we have interrogated the considerable HRM-related

literature on workplace conflict in a systematic and

rigorous manner.

After suggesting that the HRM literature seeks to

depart radically from the traditional industrial re-

lations perspective on workplace conflict, we sug-

gest that four distinctive pathways can be found in

the literature about how to manage problems effec-

tively inside organizations. By ‘pathways’ we mean

distinctive approaches to workplace conflict that de-

lineate between and prioritize particular sets of con-

flict management practices. The pathways that we

have constructed are evident in associated stands of

the research literature that concentrate on their fea-

tures, genesis and effects. We know of no other way

of bringing coherence and order to a literature that is

quite amorphous. It allows us to highlight that, while

there is a big cognitiveshift in the HRM profession to-

wards portraying conflict in an entirely negative light,

there is no unanimous buy-in to a particular method

or mode of conflict resolution across the profession.

The first pathway suggests that the best way firms

can maintain a low conflict organizational environ-

ment is by adopting a strategic approach to work-

place conflict management, which usually involves

the diffusion of alternative dispute resolution (ADR)

practices in some form or another. The second path-

way stands in contrast to the first, as it envisages

firms updating conflict management procedures and

practices through improvised and piecemeal changes.

While HR managers who prefer to make improvised

reforms to conflict management practices buy into

the idea that workplace conflict should be viewed

negatively, they are not inclined to adopt a strate-

gic approach to conflict management innovations, as

they consider that such changes lead to excessive or-

ganizational disruption. The third pathway envisages

line managers’ playing a stronger role than hitherto

in solving problems at work. The motivation behind

this pathway is to promote informal conflict man-

agement. A fourth pathway seeks to prevent the in-

cidence of workplace conflict largely by attempting

to socialize it out of the organization. The principal

method of doing so is through the systematic use of

employee engagement and other ‘organizational citi-

zenship behaviour’ practices. Before assessing these

alternative approaches, some context-setting remarks

are made about conventional approaches to managing

workplace conflict.

The changing political economy of

workplace conflict

Workplace conflict has always been defined as in-

volving grievances and disputes between individual

employees and their employers, among individuals

and between groups of employees, whether union-

ized or not, and their employers. In analytical terms,

grievances and disputes may arise from market re-

lations (differences over the pricing of labour) and

from managerial relations (differences over the exer-

cise of management authority). A classical distinction

in the literature on workplace conflict is that between

‘collective conflict’, involving employers and trade

unions and ‘individual conflict’, involving employers

and individual employees.

To understand the genesis of current approaches to

conflict management, it is important to examine the

changing political economy of conflict management

in workplaces. We do this in the next section.

The management of workplace conflict in the era

of collective industrial relations

Conventionally, large industrial, commercial and

public service organizations adopted formal disci-

plinary, grievance and dispute procedures, normally

administered by the personnel, industrial relations

function, to address workplace conflict (Williams

2011). These procedures normally prescribed formal

steps to be followed by those involved in conflict

(Lewin 1999; Slichter et al. 1960). First, employees

were required to put in writing a grievance or register

in some way a dispute. After submitting a formal

grievance, the individual employee was normally

formally represented: in unionized firms, first by a

trade union representative and then possibly by a

trade union official if the grievance travelled up the

organizational hierarchy. Disputes affecting groups

of employees in unionized firms were addressed at

a first stage of procedure by engagement between

representatives of the employees immediately af-

fected and management at the relevant level. On

the management side, progressively higher levels of

managers become involvedif the g rievanceor dispute

has not been resolved at the first or intermediary stage

of the procedure. The last stage of the procedure al-

most invariably involved a formal adjudication of the

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