Conflicts fostering understanding of value co-creation and service systems transformation in complex public service systems

Abstract

Leadership Psychology) works as a PhD researcher and university teacher in administrative sciences at the Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University. In her doctoral research, she is exploring the value of conflicts in development initiatives of public organizations. Sanna Tuurnas (DSc, Admin.) works as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Social Research, Tampere University, Finland. She specializes in the governance of public sector reform. Her current research focuses on professionalism and co-production as new forms of citizen-professional partnerships in public (welfare) service production.This is the accepted manuscript of the article, which has been published in Public Management Review.

Reimagining organisational conflicts through the metaphor of music

“…Indeed, knowledge and knowledge creation in organisations reside in the interactions and social relations of human beings (Lehtimäki, 2017;Nonaka & Takeuchi, 1995;Nonaka & Toyama, 2005;Stacey, 2011). Conflicts, as contradictory institutional arrangements-values, beliefs, aims, and practices-of interacting individuals, are unavoidably shaping the organisational life, and allowing novelty to emerge (Blomgren & Waks 2015;Mowles, 2011Mowles, , 2015Rossi & Tuurnas, 2019;Stacey, 1992Stacey, , 2011. These varying and conflicting institutional arrangements underlie the decisions, behaviour and actions of people (Skålen, Aal, & Edvardsson 2015;Vargo, Wieland, & Akaka 2015) and are therefore essential for knowledge creation and organisational development.…”

“…These varying and conflicting institutional arrangements underlie the decisions, behaviour and actions of people (Skålen, Aal, & Edvardsson 2015;Vargo, Wieland, & Akaka 2015) and are therefore essential for knowledge creation and organisational development. Theoretically, conflicts are an important subject to understand, and in practice, they are key drivers of knowledge creation and organisational development (Rossi & Tuurnas, 2019;Skålen, Aal, & Edvardsson 2015. )…”

“…Deriving from systems-thinking paradigm, the process of synthesising contradictions is referred to as institutionalisation in service ecosystems literature. In institutionalisation, actors not only create but also disrupt and maintain institutional arrangements (Rossi & Tuurnas, 2019;Trischler & Charles 2019;Vargo, Wieland, & Akaka 2015;Vink et al 2019). Institutionalisation involves co-creational processes in which actors cope with and resolve the contradictions and inconsistencies that are foundational to all institutional arrangements (Vargo, Wieland, & Akaka 2015).…”

“…Power relations both hinder and enable behaviours and actions (Vince, 2014), and they affect the actors' possibilities to change their values, beliefs, aims and practices. Power relations and institutional arrangements are thus intervened: people have unequal power to choose, of whose and which institutional arrangements are created, maintained, disturbed or, often unconsciously, followed (Rossi and Tuurnas, 2019).…”

“…Knowledge creation and organisational development are beset with conflicts (Rossi & Tuurnas, 2019;Vince, 2014), which, indeed, are "a stubborn fact of organizational life" (Kolb & Putnam, 1992, p. 311). In the predominant research paradigm, particularly studies on knowledge sharing and team performance (see, e.g., Chen, 2011;Chen, To overcome these inconsistencies, Hinds and Bailey (2003) and Kakar (2018), for example, suggest that instead of dividing conflicts into task and relationship conflicts, organisational conflicts should rather be understood as dynamic processes.…”