Disagreement, controversy, disputes, tensions, and opposition are some of the terms in common usage to cite the situations related to conflict.

People are in conflict when the actions of one person are interfering or making another’s behavior less effective.

Perception of conflict generates unpleasant feelings like anger or sadness toward the other party.

From individualist perspective, the drive to maximize advantage over others will lead to competitive tension.

From pluralist perspective, different social groups have differing goals and competing claims for scarce resources.

Marxist sees conflict in the fundementally opposed interests of the ruling and working classes.

The discipline of social psychology is concerned with small group behavior, and the discipline of organizatioal psychology partly studies team-work within organizations. Early work tended to assume that all conflict was undesirable and should be eliminated.

After the beneficial results of conflict on innovation and development, scholars tend to assume that conflict management should include not just conflict resolution, but also conflict stimulation.

Three main perspectives, namely traditionalist, behavioralist and interactionist, affect the perception of conflict and how to manage it in organizations.

The interactionist perspective indicates that we have to analyze three important question to perceive conflict as dysfunctional or functional : 1. What type of conflict is it? 2. How long does it exist? 3. What is the intensity of the conflict?

Organizational conflict can be classified as intraorganizational (conflict within an organization) and interorganizational conflict (conflict between two or more organizations).

Intraorganizational conflict has four sub-levels: Intrapersonal, Interpersonal, intragroup and intergroup conflict.

Emotions and conflict are intertwined. Conflict can be both an antecedent and a consequence of emotions.

Here are the some forms of manifest conflict :

• Violence

• Infighting

• Sabotage

• Physical Intimidation

• Lack of communication

• Open agression

Narcissism is a personal trait that contains self-love, inflated self-view, ruthlessness, devaluation of others and manipulation of others.

Ambiguity breeds conflict because unseen or unpredictable conditions create tension and stress.

Conflict management styles : integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, compromising

The ability to use a variety of conflict management styles is an advantage for leaders and employees especially in dynamic and diverse work teams.

Conflicts seldom disappear by themselves and often get deeper and grow fast without any intervention.

Conflict management is about stimulating conflict in order to reach functional outcomes for organization such as improving the processes or creating new products.