by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi
Runde, C. E., and T. A. Flanagan, Building Conflict Competent Teams, Jossey-Bass – A Wiley Imprint, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2008.
(Runde 2008).
Craig E. Runde,
Tim A. Flanagan
The book is, actually, more about how to deal with differences inside organisations. What is perhaps only implicit is the decisive role of leadership or management both in creating and in suppressing conflicts.
In my opinion, competition among individuals is always at least latent, although not necessarily it erupts in conflicts. Conflicts in organisations are created from power sources inside or outside the same organisations. Individuals are spontaneously adaptive, conflict avoiding and cowards. Generally, they let openly flow their insanities only when they feel covered from power and powers.
It is important to know how to manage internal differences. It is important to know how to manage internal competition. However, conflict rarely is spontaneous. If it is, the solution may not exist, if not removing the conflict sources. The opening of communication channels may be only a waste of resources, and even embarrassing for the people in it involved, if the individuals did not have some spontaneous tendency to conform to power.
Equally, perhaps, the book overvalues the so-called “cultural differences”. Since, finally, people in multi-cultural contexts perfectly understand each other, “cultural differences” are raised when in need of [self-]justifications for odd behaviours or for not submitting to formal power because influenced from other [real] power/s.
Formal and real elites have an enormous power on people behaviour, power frequently they do not know how to use. So, when internal disasters verify or approach, they call specialists or “specialists” for solving problems they [elites] perhaps already should know how to deal with. Subordinate individuals have also an enormous power inside organisations. As in everything, there are peculiarities and trade-offs.
Runde, C. E., and T. A. Flanagan, Building Conflict Competent Teams, Jossey-Bass – A Wiley Imprint, San Francisco, CA, USA, 2008.
