SummaryThis paper reviews the HRM literature on the management of workplace conflict. It suggests that workplace conflict is commonly viewed as a symptom of management failure in this literature: the notion that conflict may be intrinsic to the nature of work due to employees and managers having hard-to-reconcile competing interests is given short-shrift. At the same time, the paper identifies important differences in the literature, which we call pathways, about the best methods to management problems at the workplace. It is argued that four contrasting pathways can be detected in the literature with regard to how organizations approach innovating conflict management practices. Each pathway is examined fully and their respective strengths and weaknesses assessed fully.
The international literature on the economic and fiscal crisis that heralded the Great Recession emphasizes the negative effects of 'disorganized decentralization' on unions' capacities for pay coordination and ultimately on their effectiveness in representing their members. These effects are seen as particularly pronounced in countries on the 'European periphery' such as Ireland. The paper challenges this view by showing how the collapse of social partnership and centralized bargaining in Ireland was soon followed in the private sector by a new form of coordinated decentralized pattern bargaining.Coordinated sectoral bargaining emerged and was sustained in the public service. The durability of pay coordination is attributed to the strategic postures of unions, combined with embedded features of industrial relations institutions.The comparative import of the Irish case arises less from 'disorganized decentralization' than from the resilience of coordination following one of the most severe economic and fiscal shocks experienced by any advanced economy.2
Drawing on the international literature on pattern bargaining in Europe and other countries, the article examines the recent advent of pattern bargaining in Irish industrial relations. Qualitative and quantitative data are deployed to explore the genesis, features, institutional and economic context and future of pattern bargaining in Ireland.
This article identifies three ways in which alternative dispute resolution (ADR) innovations are adopted by organizations in Ireland: improvisation, incrementalism and strategy, and examines how external and internal influences shape different patterns of ADR innovation. The article contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it highlights the limitations of typologies of innovation based on simple dichotomies, such as reactive/proactive and of prevailing understandings of how ADR may interact with strategy. Second, the article develops an integrated framework for the analysis of influences on patterns of innovation that distinguishes between the features of markets and commercial strategies, organizations, stakeholders and champions and institutions, laws and public policies. Third, the article questions the central premise underlying the literature that a strategic approach to ADR equates with the adoption of conflict management systems.
This article examines whether organizations in Ireland are following their counterparts in the United States and adopting advanced conflict management innovations inspired by alternative dispute resolution. The authors find that the general pattern in Ireland is for organizations to change conflict management practices in a reactive, piecemeal manner that seldom involves any proactive or strategic action. They also identify a small group of organizations that adopt an incremental and evolutionary approach to workplace conflict management innovation that involves changing tried-and-tested conflict management practices pragmatically over time. The article suggests that apart from the United States, all other Anglo-American countries for the most part follow the pattern of workplace conflict change occurring in Ireland.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.