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THE CRIMSON PRESS CURRICULUM CENTER THE CRIMSON GROUP, INC. Note on Conflict Management

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THE CRIMSON PRESS CURRICULUM CENTER THE CRIMSON GROUP, INC.
Note on Conflict Management
President Franklin D. Roosevelt . . . attempted to generate information by recruiting strong personalities and structuring their work so that clashes would be certain. His favorite technique was to keep grants of authority incomplete, jurisdictions uncertain, and charters overlapping. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.1
It is a well-known fact of organizational life that sales people think differently from manufac- turing people. Similarly, doctors think differently from nurses, R&D engineers think differently from product line managers, professors think differently from deans, and basic researchers think differently from applied researchers. In part, these …show more content…

Young. It is intended to assist with case analyses, and not to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of administrative situations.
Copyright © 2013 by The Crimson Group, Inc. To order copies or request permission to reproduce this document, contact Harvard Business Publications (http://hbsp.harvard.edu/). Under provisions of United States and interna- tional copyright laws, no part of this document may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from The Crimson Group (www.thecrimsongroup.org) gine and home appliance divisions at General Electric (which resulted from regular meetings to explore, discuss, and decide upon what GE called “cross-business synergies”). Left unmanaged, or poorly managed, however, conflict can create organizational havoc.
CONCEPTUAL BACKGROUND
In 1967, Paul Lawrence and Jay Lorsch, both professors at the Harvard Business School, published a landmark book on conflict and conflict management, entitled Organization and Environment.3 The book made the then-novel point that organizational conflict arises because different functional specialists face different technical, economic, and geographic “environments.” As a result, these individuals have different “cognitive and emotional” orientations, which Lawrence and Lorsch (L&L)

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