Abstract


Organizations are responsible for creating a work environment that enables people to thrive. If turf war, disagreement, and differences of opinion escalate into conflict you must intervene immediately. Conflict in the organization can be constructive or destructive for an organization. Most of the time it is destructive affecting morale, productivity and even turnover. In fact, the Chinese character for "conflict" represents two meanings, opportunity and danger. As a manager you need to find and focus on how to make it beneficial and how to minimize the negative aspects. As the CEO, you have to create an organizational culture that encourage and even rewards good conflict management, your goal has to be to increase the benefits achieved from managing and encouraging beneficial conflict, like task and process conflict, while managing, resolving and reducing the negative effects of relationship conflict. This article looks in to how to manage conflict in the organization. It provides definite positive and negative consequences, theory, type, example, current research results, conflict management strategies with their related studies, and resolution process of conflict. Different writers have defined organizational conflict in different way. The common key words, which are used in these definitions, are frustration, incongruence, incompatibility and mismatch. There are six levels of conflict: Intra-individual conflict, Inter-individual conflict, Intra-group conflict, Inter-group conflict, Intra-organizational conflict and Inter-organizational conflict. Another important organizational concept is the "Organizational Commitment". The four approaches to study and conceptualize OC are: Attitudinal approach, Behavioral approach, normative approach and Multidimensional approach. This paper is an attempt to understand the causes, consequences and types of conflicts and suggest remedial steps for the smooth functioning of the organization.