Conflict Resolution to Project Success
This article examines five strategies for solving common disagreements:
confronting, dominating, compromising, accommodating, and avoiding. Pay
attention to the literature review.
Introduction
Nowadays, there is a big consensus around the fact that projects have
great leverage when it comes to creating
and improving the processes and products that companies offer to the
market. Therefore, in today's increasingly
globalized world, the aforementioned setting has become even more
multicultural and multidisciplinary, forcing Project Managers (PM) to
combine and align the interests of diverse stakeholders, all while
keeping in mind very
different points of view and having to face conflicts with varying
origins, as they focus on the daily management of
the projects.
This article aims to thoroughly examine the main strategies applied when
managing conflicts that may arise when
dealing with internal stakeholders, which are later put into practice,
depending on the source of the conflict, by
Project Managers, in order to evaluate their impact on the project
performance. Furthermore, we will analyze other
influential factors, such as the different roles carried out: PM or team
member (TM).
In order to achieve the proposed objectives, we have surveyed students
studying their last year of Industrial
Engineering at the ETSII-UPM, subsequently contrasting the results,
using a panel of 17 Senior Project Managers
who work in international consultancies, as control group, for research
results.
The paper is structured in the following way. First, we present the
theoretical perspective used in the paper,
namely that of the organizational capabilities and the knowledge-based
theory of the firm. Second, we review the
literature on project competence and project capabilities. Third, we
present our research methodology and discuss
the design of our longitudinal case study. Fourth, we describe the four
project epochs identified in the evolution of
ABB (1950–2000) and then turn to a theoretical analysis. The paper ends
with a summary of our findings and a
discussion of their implications.