Conflict Management Approaches for Teams Effectiveness and Innovation: A study of Pakistan’s ICT Firms (T-0653) (MFN 6906)

Abstract

Conflicts are ubiquitous, particularly in organizations where the stakes are high. This study investigates the approaches to conflicts management, which are used to resolve these conflicts and predict the level of innovation and team effectiveness in an organization using conflict management. This study proposes how managers should manage conflict that would contribute to their team’s effectiveness and promote innovation. Managers from different domestic and multinational organizations are part of this study. One hundred and fifty-one managers from ICT (Information Communication Technology) organizations in Pakistan were surveyed in order to record their conflict management approaches (avoiding, cooperative, and competitive) and their resulting outcome, productive conflict. The survey results in form of filled-out questionnaires enabled this research to assess various hypotheses. Moreover, the organizational managers of these organizations also indicated measures of their management team’s effectiveness and overall organizational innovation. The results reinforce a supposition that better conflict management approaches can make managers more effective. Correlation and path coefficients recommend that avoiding conflict management approach encourages productive conflicts and effectiveness of managers that consequently result in organizational innovation. These results, linked with previous research, suggest that the avoiding conflict management approach is an important contributor to productive conflicts, especially in the cultural setting of Pakistan. This thesis contributes to the conflict management literature for promoting organizational innovation particularly in the context of ICT firms.