BUS603: Managing People

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the role of contradiction, negation, and rational unit in the thought of Friedrich Hegel.
2. Identify two opposing models for characterizing conflict.
3. List ways in which healthy conflict can benefit a group.
   

That which is willed happens but rarely; in the majority of instances the numerous desired ends cross and conflict with one another, or these ends themselves are from the outset incapable of realization, or the means of attaining them are insufficient. Thus the conflicts of innumerable individual wills and individual actions in the domain of history produce a state of affairs entirely analogous to that prevailing in the realm of unconscious nature.

- Friedrich Engels

I don't like that person. I'm going to have to get to know him better

- Abraham Lincoln

A cartoon from the 1970s shows two women standing behind a couch where their husbands are sitting and watching a football game. One woman says to the other, "I thought they settled all that last year!" Do you suppose it would be nice if people could settle their differences once and for all, if conflict would just go away, and if everyone would just agree with each other and get along all the time?

Of course, those rosy developments aren't going to take place. Conflict seems to stubbornly retain its position as part of the human landscape; you can hardly find a group of people who aren't experiencing it right now or have never experienced it.

There's reason to believe, too, that a moderate amount of conflict can actually be a healthy and necessary part of group life if it is handled productively and ethically. We may actually be better off, in other words, if we experience conflict than if we don't, provided that we turn it to advantage.

The 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel believed that contradiction and negation, which constitute both causes and ingredients of conflict, lead every domain of reality toward higher rational unity. He wrote that each level of interaction among human beings, including those which take place in larger social structures, preserves the contradictions of previous levels as phases and subparts Pelczynski, A.Z.

Much more recently, research by Jehn and Mannix Jehn, K. A., & Mannix, E. A. indicated that "effective teams over time are characterized by low but increasing levels of task conflict, low levels of relationship conflict with a rise toward the end of a project, and moderate levels of task conflict in the middle of the task timeline".