CHAPTER TWELVE

TEAMWORK

Understanding Communication and Conflict in Groups

When the U.S. Internal Revenue Service went through the major transformation described at the beginning of Chapter Eight, it appointed twenty-four design teams to plan the new structures and processes the organization would need. Employees from all levels and many different locations came together to work in these teams, and they had to communicate effectively and confront and resolve conflicts. To emphasize the importance attached to these teams, the commissioner and the deputy commissioner of the IRS met with each of the teams in long, intensive sessions. The commissioner became virtually legendary within the organization for the attentiveness with which he prepared for the meetings (by doing all the reading), listened in the meetings, and responded to each meeting with a “white paper” or written reaction to the information and ideas communicated in the meeting. Meanwhile, the commissioner also continued to communicate with the people in the IRS about the changes that were going on, through videotaped talks, the organizational newsletter, and other channels. As described in the next chapter, the Social Security Administration reorganized its public service centers into groups of about forty people in “modules” that would handle the processing of an individual client’s claim from beginning to end. In effect these modules were work teams. During these changes, plenty of conflicts broke out, as they always do in any major organizational change. These examples are not unusual in government organizations. The National Organizations Survey is apparently the only survey of a probability sample of organizations—that is, a representative sample of organizations—ever conducted in the United States (or anywhere else). In that survey, respondents who worked for government more often reported that their organization employed teams and teamwork, than did the respondents from the private sector. This evidence indicates that teams are more frequently used in government than in the private sector, but whatever the case, for public sector leaders and managers, skills in building and leading teams are essential.

Jack Medlin provides an additional example of the roles of teams in government (Simpson, 2011). Medlin is a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, a federal agency. Medlin and a colleague received the highest award that the Afghan government confers upon a civilian. They received the award for leading teams of U.S. geologists in discovering valuable mineral resources and petroleum resources in Afghanistan, and in establishing systems for detecting potential earthquakes and guarding against their dangers. The American geologists’ motivation was to provide the Afghans with information about their geological resources that they could use to develop their nations’ wealth and industry, and save lives. Medlin and teams of geologists faced significant danger because of Taliban fighters who would target any activities of the United States. The geological teams requested that the U.S. military forces allow them twenty-four hours to analyze the geological resources in areas where airborne detection procedures indicated petroleum and mineral deposits. The military leaders told them that the situation was so dangerous that the teams of geologists could spend only one hour at each site they needed to analyze. A helicopter would land at the site. A platoon of marines would dismount from the helicopter and form a protective perimeter around the site. Then a helicopter would bring in the geological team. Each member of the team had practiced the role that each one needed to play, to gather maximal information within one hour. As they worked, aircraft circled overhead, to provide protection. Ultimately, the teams identified very valuable petroleum and mineral resources at the sites, and the Afghan government contracted with corporations from other nations to develop those resources. These contracts will provide revenues for the government of Afghanistan. The final outcome of these processes remains to be seen. Whatever the outcome, as did the military personnel who led the teams in, the U.S. geologists went into harm’s way to do what they considered a duty and a benefit to the people of another nation. Teams of government workers risked their lives for what they hoped would benefit the people of another nation, and that would benefit humankind.

The examples of teams are hardly original. Living organisms have displayed effective teamwork since prehistoric times. Human group processes and behaviors served as one of the founding topics in the social and administrative sciences. Teams, committees, task forces, work units, and other groupings make up the structure and activity of organizations. As the IRS and SSA examples illustrate, many organizational change and improvement efforts involve group processes, such as quality circles, or organizational development interventions, such as team-building exercises or problem-solving groups. Social scientists have studied groups so intensively for so many years that, as with other important topics such as motivation, the research has discovered more and more complexities. So many kinds of groups operate under so many different conditions that researchers must strain to understand all the variations. Yet group processes have never lost their significance for managers. If anything, they have become more significant recently. A recent trend toward team-based organization and team-based management has swept through many organizations, including public agencies (Katzenbach and Smith, 2001; Mohrman, Cohen, and Mohrman, 1995). The literature and practical applications of high-performance work systems and high-performance organizations in business firms now heavily emphasize the use of teams and the importance of constant communication (Appelbaum, Bailey, Berg, and Kalleberg, 2000; Lawler, 2003; Lawler, Mohrman, and Benson, 2001).

Organizational communications and conflict do not occur only within and between groups. As suggested in Chapter Five, in the discussion of managing relations with the media, public managers’ communication responsibilities involve managing a complex range of channels and targets (Garnett, 1992; Graber, 2003). Yet much of the research on groups came about because people realized that groups influence communication and conflict among their members and between themselves and other groups. In addition, communication and conflict often intertwine. For example, suppose that members of the department of human services of a large state communicate to members of the state’s department of labor that the labor department’s opposition to a program to aid migrant laborers simply reflects its subservience to certain wealthy fruit growers. The labor department officials communicate back that the human services department is proposing an incompetently designed program just to build its own empire. Any skillful, highly trained social scientist might detect the presence of conflict in this situation. Conflict may cause or result from bad communication, and the way out of conflict usually emphasizes the establishment of effective communication. Researchers have examined many dimensions of communication and conflict in organizations. This chapter concentrates on certain fundamental points that figure importantly in discussions of organizational change and improvement. In addition, as usual, the discussion covers the application of these topics to public organizations.

Groups in Organizations

Research has demonstrated that although groups often place strong pressures on their members to conform to others in their group, they also represent arenas for sharing and communicating. They affect the way we view ourselves and others, in and out of our groups, and the way we behave toward people. They influence our attitudes, including acceptance or rejection of new ideas. Chapter Two describes some of the classic research on groups—by Lewin, the Hawthorne researchers, Coch and French, and others—and how group processes have been a central topic in organizational development over the years. These and many other researchers have developed a number of important and lasting insights about groups. They have shown how groups can influence work habits and productivity, and they have shed light on the attitudes that group members maintain and how changes in those attitudes affect their behaviors. They have found that cohesion and commitment in groups can enforce attitudes and norms within the group and increase or decrease group performance and productivity, depending on the direction of group consensus. Group participation in decision making can enhance the quality of decisions and acceptance of change within an organization. Yet very cohesive groups can also clash with other groups, and groups can censor each other in harmful ways. Developing effective groups, then, involves a careful process of taking advantage of their potential without falling prey to their pitfalls. The literature now contains abundant guidance for the design and operation of groups and teams (Hackman, 2002; Harris, 2002; Katzenbach and Smith, 2001; Mohrman, Cohen, and Mohrman, 1995; Zander, 1994), so the discussion here concentrates on some basic topics about the nature of groups and their advantages and disadvantages.

Group Formation, Norms, and Roles

The question of why and how groups form invites simple answers, such as “The assistant secretary appointed a representative of each major division in the agency.” Yet in every group, unique informal patterns emerge that belie these simple answers. Groups may form through official appointments by leaders or under official rules or as a result of task imperatives such as the need for certain specializations. Some groups form entirely voluntarily, and even in formally established groups, members may decide how much to contribute or hold back, how much to cooperate or conflict, and so on. Groups vary in their attraction for members and in their influence over them. Members move into roles and levels of influence that may correspond little to those that are formally designated.

Earlier chapters discussed some of the reasons for these variations, including French and Raven’s typology of power (1968)—reward power, coercive power, expert power, referent power, and legitimate power. French and Raven were group theorists and intended their typology for analyses of why groups vary in their power to wield influence as a group, their attractiveness to their members, and their power over their members. Psychological experiments have shown that people often have fundamental impulses to group together with others. Psychologists interested in social comparison processes have pointed out that people often lack clear information about how they are doing and what they should do and thus draw on others as referents for their own behavior. Groups have a strong influence on people in this respect. Also, groups gain power and attractiveness as referents partly by dint of their other bases of power, such as their control of rewards, their expertness, and so on.

The controls that groups exert over their members have received much attention because of their obvious importance. As groups form, group norms and values develop. Some researchers find the concept of norms, or standards of behavior and attitudes shared by group members, to be elusive and vague. Whether or not the concept of norms perfectly captures the phenomenon, however, groups clearly display patterns of conformity to certain behaviors and beliefs.

Researchers have also analyzed the elaboration of various roles in groups, especially the psychological and social roles that may not follow formal assignments. Leadership obviously figures very importantly, and much of the work reviewed in Chapter Eleven, such as Fiedler’s theory, pertains to group leadership. Although leadership in groups obviously may follow from formal assignments and rank, informal leaders often emerge as well. Researchers who have intensively studied the development of leadership in newly formed groups report such findings as the importance of participation: those who participate most actively most often become the leaders in the eyes of other members. Researchers have also discovered, however, that although long-winded, assertive types sometimes come to be regarded as leaders early on, groups later turn more and more to less outspoken, more competent persons. In fact, multiple roles can emerge, with one or several people taking the lead in social and emotional matters, such as maintaining morale and harmony, and another person pressing for effective group structure and task accomplishment.

Group Contexts, Structures, and Outcomes

Generalizations about groups, particularly from research on experimental groups, provide insights, but very diffuse ones. Researchers have worked on the implications of variations in group settings and characteristics to try to understand the effects of such contingencies as group size, tasks, communication patterns, and composition. Groups often have advantages over individuals (and larger groups over smaller groups) because of the availability of more talents, ideas, viewpoints, and other resources. Groups often outperform individuals at certain decision-making and problem-solving tasks. Yet larger groups can often suffer problems related to unwieldiness, diffusion of responsibility, and the presence of “free riders.” Some research has also suggested that social relations tend to become more formal in larger groups and that their members tend to tolerate more impersonal, task-oriented behaviors by leaders.

Researchers have also intensively examined variations in group tasks, such as variations between individual and collaborative tasks and structured and unstructured tasks. Some researchers have produced evidence of the social facilitation of individual tasks, whereby the mere presence of another person enhances performance on familiar tasks. For more collaborative or group tasks, researchers and theorists have woven a complex array of concepts and relationships among group size and such task characteristics as homogeneity or heterogeneity and disjunctiveness or conjunctiveness. The material on contingency theories of organization (Chapter Eight) provides important implications for managers in relation to this topic, such as the need for subunits with more complex and variable tasks to have more flexible, interactive processes.

The structure and composition of groups also influence their processes, of course. Highly diverse groups whose members represent many different backgrounds and goals face particularly severe challenges in establishing smooth working relations. Examples include groups with an appointed member from each department in an organization or from each of a set of interest groups (such as a community advisory group for a government agency) and groups formed to carry out negotiations between labor and management. The communication structure imposed on a group can also determine many important outcomes. For example, Leavitt (1951) conducted research on communication networks in groups, comparing communication processes and outcomes in groups required to communicate in different patterns. In one pattern, the circle, members communicated with only two members (those adjacent to them), so information had to move around the group in a circle. In a chain pattern, members were arranged in a line, along which communication had to flow back and forth. In a wheel pattern, all communication had to flow through one member occupying the central hub position. Other patterns included a fully interconnected group with all members able to communicate directly with all the others. The patterns determined numerous outcomes for the groups. The wheel produced the fastest transmission of information and good accuracy but low overall satisfaction, except for the person in the middle, who had a great time, usually emerging as the leader of a centralized process. The chain and circle produced slower communication, with less accuracy; nobody liked the chain very much, but members expressed high satisfaction with the circle. In both the circle and the completely interconnected group, communication was often slow, but everyone got the word more effectively than with the other forms, and members felt higher satisfaction. The research thus dramatizes a trade-off faced by managers and groups that is also suggested by contingency theory. Many of the human-relations-oriented models prescribe participation, and these experiments demonstrate that when people more actively participate, they understand more and feel better about the process. Yet the research also shows that such processes often move slowly, and a more centralized structure has some advantages in speed, accuracy, and leadership impact. Managers and groups have to choose the most important outcome.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Groups

These sorts of findings from research and experience have made it clear that groups can serve as media for good or bad outcomes, depending on many factors. Managers must consider when and how groups can operate with the most value. Maier (1967) provided a list of pros and cons of using groups for problem solving, to which people often refer. Groups can bring in more knowledge, information, approaches, and alternatives than individuals. The participation of more people in group settings increases organization members’ understanding and acceptance of decisions; members have a better idea of what the group decided and why, and they can carry this information back to people in the other units or groups to which they belong. But the social pressures in groups can bolster majority opinions regardless of their quality. Aggressive individuals or subgroups may stifle more capable members. As indicated by research described earlier, groups may press for conformity and move toward solutions too rapidly by stifling dissent. Some members may concentrate simply on winning, from their own or their unit’s point of view.

Maier also pointed out that other factors can be good or bad, depending on the skill of the leader. Effective leaders can manage conflict and disagreement constructively and turn the relative slowness of group decision making to advantage, achieving good outcomes such as conflict resolution and more carefully discussed decisions. Groups may also make risky decisions. While exerting pressures for conformity, they often paradoxically create a dispersion of responsibility, whereby individuals shirk or evade responsibility for the group’s actions or take social cues from others in the group that lead them to mistakenly underestimate the significance of a problem. Individuals may outperform groups when creativity and efficiency are paramount, acceptance of the decision is less crucial, the most qualified person is easy to identify, individuals are very unlikely to cooperate, or little time is available (Gordon, 2002).

Groupthink

Irving Janis’s work on groupthink (1971) reflected many of the elements of this body of research that have particular significance for managers, especially managers and leaders in government (’t Hart, 1990). Janis said he discovered groupthink not just in many organizational decision-making processes but also in some of the most immensely significant decisions, such as major strategic decisions by firms, and public policy decisions such as the bombing of North Vietnam during the Johnson administration and John Kennedy’s decision to carry out the Bay of Pigs invasion. Janis argued that groups under the stress of making major decisions often exhibit the symptoms of groupthink. They need consensus and commitment to the course of action they choose, and the pressure for conformity leads members to see the group as invulnerable to opponents, to develop rationales to explain away or avoid serious consideration of apparent problems and threats, and to both see themselves as morally right and stereotype their opponents as incapable or immoral. Pressure for agreement and unanimity falls on members who dissent, as others press them to agree and support the group and its leader. Members sometimes adopt the role of “mind guards”—withholding information that might shake the group consensus—and engage in self-censorship, stifling their own impulse to disagree.

Janis described instances of groupthink primarily at lofty levels of authority, but managers encounter it in many settings. At the annual meeting of the county commissioners’ association of a large state, for example, when the association’s governing council convened, council members expressed outrage over new environmental protection regulations that the state legislature was imposing on the state’s counties. Certain council members fulminated against the regulations, charging that they usurped the counties’ rightful authority. As the discussion continued, members increasingly characterized the state legislators and agency executives behind the changes as tyrants and empire builders and depicted themselves as noble defenders of their constituents’ right to govern themselves. They boldly proclaimed their intention to write a strong letter of protest to the legislators and agency officials (a step likely to prove ineffectual). These members reacted scornfully to suggestions that a more reasonable and moderate discussion of the situation would be more productive, as if those making such suggestions lacked courage. They thus displayed groupthink symptoms, such as stereotyping the opposition, overestimating one’s own position, and stifling dissent.

Janis prescribed a number of steps leaders can take to help groups avoid groupthink:

• Encourage members to act as critical evaluators and impartial decision makers.
• Accept criticisms of your own actions.
• Invite outside experts to join the discussion.
• Require members to discuss the matter with others outside the group.
• Assign two or more groups to work on the problem separately.
• Assign a member to play devil’s advocate.
• Break the group into two subgroups at key points.
• Set aside time to review threats to the group’s decision and any possible weaknesses in it.
• At major decision points, hold “last chance” sessions in which members can air their reservations.

Later in this chapter we will consider an abundance of additional advice and procedures for managing groups. Before turning to those, however, it is useful to cover some basic ideas about communication and conflict.

Communication in Organizations

Besides communication in and between groups, other forms and channels of communication play crucial roles in organizations. The ideas about power, strategy, structure, and leadership considered earlier are relevant here as well, because communication can occur through organizational rules and structures themselves, through formal written documents, and in one-on-one exchanges with superiors (Graber, 2003; Pandey and Garnett, 2006).

Discussions of organizational communication typically begin with a very general model of the communication process. According to such models, communication begins with the source from which a message originates. A transmitter encodes the message and sends it to a receiver, who decodes it and moves it to a destination. Noise influences the accuracy of the transmission. Other general conceptions depict a person as both a sender of messages, through particular channels, to another person, and a receiver of messages, back through the same or other channels, from that other person. Both people also communicate with other recipients and senders concomitantly. These fairly obvious models show what the research and theory emphasize—the nature of sources, senders, and recipients; the channels along which messages flow; and in particular, the problem of noise or distortion that impedes the accurate transmission of information (Downs, 1988).

Typical discussions also distinguish among horizontal communication, vertical (upward and downward) communication, and external (outward) communication with environmental components. Horizontal communications encounter difficulties as a result of conflict, competition, or other differences between subunits and groups. Vertical communications encounter difficulties as a result of hierarchical filtering and superior-subordinate relationships, including resistance, inattentiveness, misunderstanding, and reticence or withholding of information by lower levels. The distinction between formal and informal communications processes, already familiar by now, receives due notice, as does the research on communication networks described earlier.

Communication Roles

Analysts of organizational communication have drawn on concepts from other areas of the social sciences to distinguish roles in the communication process (Rogers and Argawala-Rogers, 1976). Gatekeepers occupy positions in which they can control the flow of information between units and groups. Others around opinion leaders look to them for information about the form their own opinions should take. People in liaison roles transmit information between two or more units or groups. Cosmopolites have many contacts outside the organization and bring a lot of external information into the organization.

Communication Assessments and Audits

Beyond these generalizations, obviously, myriad dimensions of communication receive attention from researchers, as illustrated by the now numerous survey instruments and other procedures for assessing communication in organizations (Downs, 1988). Most of these tools ask individuals for their perceptions and evaluations of the information they receive in their organization and of its communication process. For example, the communications audit questionnaire of the International Communications Association asks about the amount of information the respondent sends and receives on an array of topics—job performance, pay and benefits, relationship of his or her own work to the overall organization, new procedures, organizational problems and policies, and so on. It also asks about the amount of information the respondent needs to send and receive. It asks similar questions about the amount of information sent to and received from various sources, such as top management, middle management, immediate supervisors, coworkers, and the grapevine. Other questions ask about respondents’ satisfaction with the information they receive, the organization and extent of their organization’s communication processes, how much follow-up on communications they need and receive, and the quality of the organizational and work climate. Other communication assessment procedures track specific messages through the organization and map the dissemination of information. Still others map actual communication networks in organizations, analyzing who communicates with whom and about what.

Communication Problems

Obviously, the main issue in communications is getting it right, so the discussion often turns rapidly to what goes wrong. Exhibit 12.1 provides lists of communication difficulties. The exhibit first presents lists of communication barriers. These lists are typical of the way such problems are identified and expressed in the general management and organizational behavior literature. Then the exhibit presents a list of communication distortions that may occur in public bureaucracies, such as jargon, inflated prose, and the manipulation of information for political or bureaucratic purposes.

Some of the greatest literary and journalistic figures of the past two centuries have poured their talents into ridiculing and decrying these tendencies in government bureaucracies. Some of these critiques have become embodied in academic theories that posit that public bureaucracies and bureaucrats distort and manipulate information more aggressively than their counterparts in business. Before examining these and other theories and evidence about communication in public organizations, it is useful to cover the concept of conflict in organizations, which often intermingles with communication processes.

Conflict in Organizations

Conflict has always represented a fundamental challenge for organizations and leaders. Frederick Taylor (1919) said that he pursued the principles of scientific management in part because he wanted to diminish conflicts between workers and managers by providing scientific solutions to the questions they regularly disputed. Lawrence and Lorsch (1967), in their seminal study of organizational design processes, found high levels of conflict in very effective organizations and very high investments in managing rather than avoiding conflict. Some of the most recent developments in organizational design, such as matrix designs and ideas about fluid and duplicating structures, intentionally design conflict into organizational structures. Research shows that well-managed conflict often improves decision making in organizations. Research also shows, however, that managers, especially in business organizations, tend to dislike conflict and seek to avoid it, even though such conflict avoidance may lead to less effective decision making (Schwenk, 1990).

In public and nonprofit organizations, one expects and even hopes for intense conflicts, although preferably not destructive ones. As noted earlier, public organizations often embody the unceasing political competition and public policy dilemmas of the nation. Government agencies and their subunits and managers compete for resources, for executive and legislative attention, and over their “turf” (Wilson, 1989). They share responsibilities for programs and policies but often have differing points of view and priorities. New administrations and newly elected and appointed officials enter the picture regularly and rapidly, claiming new mandates, attempting to forget or freeze programs into which people have poured their work lives, or setting out to do things differently and better. Ombudsmen, examiners, auditors, oversight agencies, and legislative committees and hearings have a duty to take a sharply questioning and often conflicting view of an agency’s operations. Often at issue are the very lives or major living conditions of many people, and massive amounts of money, power, and influence. The separation of powers designed into the U.S. government actually calls for conflicting interests and authority as checks against one another. Yates (1985) observed that “Madisonian systems” with built-in contentions and divided authority abound in public and private organizations. Schwenk (1990) found that executives in nonprofit organizations see a positive relationship between conflict in the decision-making process and the quality of the resultant decisions, whereas executives in for-profit organizations regard conflict as damaging to the quality and clarity of decisions. The nonprofit executives, which included executives from government agencies, had to consider the needs of diverse constituents and groups. They found conflict unpleasant, but they regarded it as useful in clarifying the needs and goals of diverse groups.

One must expect conflict, then, and try to make a healthy form of it flow in government and its agencies. Keeping it healthy represents the key challenge. Research on organizations has focused on what types of conflict occur, what brings it about, how it proceeds, and, as this chapter later covers somewhat, how to manage it constructively.

Types of Conflict

Experts on organizational conflict point out that numerous types and forms of conflict occur in organizations. Conflict can exist within a person (as the concepts of role conflict and role ambiguity emphasize), between people, and within and between groups and organizational departments or divisions. Conflict can range horizontally, across levels of an organization. It can occur vertically, between higher and lower levels (the classic example is a dispute between management and labor; another common example is a battle within a geographically dispersed government agency or business firm between the people at headquarters and field or district personnel).

Bases of Conflict

All types of conflict can originate in or be aggravated by organizational or subunit culture, values, goals, structures, tasks and functions, authority and leadership processes, and environmental pressures, as well as by the demographics and individual personalities of organizational or group members. You name it and it can cause a flare-up.

Researchers have provided useful lists of some of the most frequent sources of strife; these can help us sort through some of this complexity. They have cited differences in goals, values, cultures, and priorities, of course. The sociologists who began emphasizing dysfunctional bureaucracies around midcentury pointed out that the specialization of work and responsibility that bureaucracy involves, with its emphasis on reliable adherence to the rules and goals of specialized units, virtually ensures conflicts among units (for example, see the entry on Merton in Exhibit 2.1 in Chapter Two). Differences in power, status, rewards, and resources among people and groups can lead to feelings of inequity, or the simple need to compete with others can cause conflict. When two groups’ tasks or decision-making processes overlap, are intensely interdependent, or naturally compete, tensions can boil over. Not always mentioned in the research, but quite obvious, are the surprisingly frequent instances of significant conflict among high-level officials based simply on clashes of personal style and ego.

Conflict Stages and Modes

Analysts of conflict have also noted what they call the phases of conflict episodes. Pondy’s frequently cited classification (1967), for example, consists of five stages:

As people and groups respond to the onset of conflict, their responses can take various forms. Thomas (1983) pointed out that people can respond through avoidance (trying to ignore or withdraw from the conflict). They can try accommodation, in which they cooperate and make concessions to the other party’s demands or needs. Compromise involves an exchange of concessions and cooperative responses (without one side being more accommodating than the other). Competing involves simply trying to force, outdo, or defeat the other party, without any appreciable accommodation or concern for its goals and needs. Collaborating occurs when two parties work together to meet both parties’ needs mutually; it differs from compromise in that the two parties do not simply give up on certain goals and values but rather work to find ways to maximize returns for both.

Yates (1985) also offered useful suggestions for developing strategies and tactics for managing conflict. He described methods of fostering a competitive debate among conflicting parties, using neutral language to avoid escalating hostilities and behaving with civility and mutual respect. He suggested approaches that involve identifying mutual problems and avoiding enmity, win-or-lose situations, and long-term resentments. One does this partly through including all affected parties, providing complete information, and keeping communication channels open. Yates proposed a process of conflict management that has many similarities to the management of culture and transformational leadership described in Chapter Eleven. The conflict manager must understand the people involved, establish a sense of shared mission to give the parties an incentive to resolve the conflict, and adopt an incremental approach, focusing on winning concrete issues.

Conflict Outcomes, Suppression, and Escalation

Experts on conflict have also detailed its outcomes and effects, though these are fairly obvious in much of the rest of the organizational behavior literature. Excessive conflict can induce stress, frustration, dissatisfaction, high turnover, absenteeism, and poor performance among employees. When poorly managed, it can damage organizations. The preceding discussion of types and modes of conflict provides a useful reminder that suppressed or poorly handled conflict can hurt an organization, in part because it can escalate more easily. Researchers point out that conflict can feed on itself, aggravating the sorts of barriers to communication described earlier—the use of charged language, bias in sending and receiving information, a tendency to interpret neutral statements from the other party as negative or aggressive, reduction of communication, and formation of we-they, win-lose perceptions of relationships. Severely entrenched, intense conflict can make an organization sick, like a mentally disturbed person who does irrational, self-destructive things.

Sometimes managers have to work with organizations facing severe challenges to effective communication and to deal with people and groups that have many reasons to come into conflict. Researchers and consultants have developed a fairly rich fund of prescriptions for managing and improving group processes, communication, and conflict resolution processes in such organizations. After we look at these, the discussion will return to special considerations about public organizations.

Managing Groups, Communication, and Conflict in Organizations

Earlier chapters covered many topics relevant to managing groups, communication, and conflict, and the following chapters will cover still more. The discussion of leadership in Chapter Eleven described propositions from Fiedler’s contingency theory, path-goal theory, life-cycle theory, and other approaches to understanding how leaders should and do behave toward the groups they lead. These theories emphasize the many variations in leadership settings and styles among organizations and the need for setting and style to mesh. Keeping these many variations in mind, group theorists have suggested numerous general prescriptions for managing groups. The prescriptions for avoiding groupthink are one example. Leaders also must try to enhance the attractiveness of group membership to increase group harmony, cohesiveness, and motivation (Zander, 1994). The typology of power offered by French and Raven (1968)—reward, coercive, expert, referent, and legitimate power—serves as a guide to some of the types of incentives that leaders can enhance and draw on to make groups effective. That typology implies additional incentives for group membership and motivation—such as prestige, a sense of having an impact or being important, conviviality, specialness of membership, and so on—that group theorists advise leaders to use. Many group theorists have a greater human relations orientation than do leadership theorists. Prominent group theorists have typically argued that, in general, effective work groups require participative leaders who respect the dignity of group members and maintain harmony in groups (Zander, 1994).

This human relations emphasis probably comes from the close connections between group theory and the field of organization development (OD). Chapter Thirteen describes OD and some of the specific group techniques used to improve organizations, such as team building and T-group procedures, and to enhance effectiveness, communication, and conflict resolution in work groups. OD consultants also use a variety of techniques to enhance communication and resolve conflicts between different groups (Gordon, 2002). For example, they might use an organizational mirror procedure, in which other groups in the organization report their views of a particular group or unit to that group so that it can better assess its impact on and relations with others. A confrontation meeting brings two or more warring groups together to analyze and resolve the conflicts between them. Third-party interventions and interpersonal facilitator approaches have a person from outside the groups, and often from outside the organization, come in to help with the conflict-resolution process. The latter involves a more central role for the facilitator in transmitting communications between the two groups (Blake and Mouton, 1984).

Most of these techniques involve ways of controlling the expression of hostility and aggression to prevent conflict from escalating. They usually try to provide a systematic way to uncover the nature of the conflict and discover a base for resolving it, through such procedures as image exchanges, in which members of the groups relate their views of the other group; sharing appreciation procedures, which call on group members to express appreciation of good things about the other group; and having the members list their expectations about the outcomes of the process. Management consultants may propose the use of a dialectical inquiry technique for managing and encouraging conflict in strategic decision-making processes. In this technique, the development of a strategic plan is followed by the development of a counterplan that questions the assumptions of the original plan. A devil’s advocacy approach involves a critique of the basic assumptions of the strategic plan but does not propose a specific alternative (Schwenk, 1990).

Numerous other group procedures and techniques, not necessarily connected to OD practices, abound in organizations. The success of quality circles in Japan has led to their proliferation among organizations in the United States and other countries. A quality circle brings the members of a work group or organizational unit together for special group sessions on how to improve the quality of the unit’s work and products. Organizations also typically employ special task forces, venture groups, policy committees, and other group-based approaches that explicitly seek to take advantage of group capacities. Several group decision-making procedures—such as the nominal group technique, brainstorming, and the Delphi technique—can facilitate communication and management of potential conflict within and among groups (Gordon, 2002). In the nominal group technique, each group member makes a list of responses to a focal question or issue—for example, What are the organization’s most important goals? One by one, each group member reads aloud the first item on his or her list, then the second item, and so on. As the lists are read, the items are recorded and displayed for the group to see. The group then discusses the set of items—goals, in this example—to clarify them, discuss disagreements, and combine similar ones. They then follow any of several possible methods for coming to agreement on the final set of goals. (These kinds of group processes now have computer software to support them, and may take place in computer labs or technologically sophisticated conference rooms where the groups can use such technology.) The procedure thus allows each person to contribute, minimizes digression, and channels conflict into constructive patterns. Brainstorming sessions invite members to suggest all alternatives or possibilities about an issue or problem that they can think of. The group records all suggestions and then evaluates them and works toward a conclusion. In the Delphi technique, a smaller group prepares a questionnaire about a topic, circulates it to a larger group, and then uses the latter’s responses to prepare a revised questionnaire. This second questionnaire is circulated along with information about the results of the first questionnaire, and the process is repeated until a consensus develops within the larger group.

In addition, communications experts commonly stress the usefulness of conducting organization-wide communications audits of the sort described earlier. They point to the crucial role of the climate or culture of an organization in fostering or stifling communication and in determining whether and how well people manage conflicts.

Special Considerations for Public Organizations

The preceding review demonstrates that researchers have treated these topics as generally applicable across all organizations, with no need for any particular distinction among public, private, and nonprofit organizations. The review also indicates why they have taken this posture. They state the models and propositions at a high level of generality to make them applicable across groups and organizations. They see that managers in government, business, and nonprofit settings face common challenges in dealing with these dimensions of their work and can apply many of the proposed responses just as well in any of the sectors.

Still, some of the time-honored observations about government bureaucracies claim sharp distinctions between that domain and business firms in matters pertaining to groups, communication, and conflict. Many of these virtually classic views echo throughout some of the most prominent recent theoretical efforts. In many governmental settings, for example, an elaborate, diverse configuration of groups and authorities contests over organizational policies and decisions. As noted earlier, inside and outside government organizations, “Madisonian systems” operate (the product of laws that formally establish multiple authorities) or arise as a result of the activities of groups and individuals seeking to influence government policies—the pluralistic governmental processes long discussed by political scientists. Complex groups and interests outside an organization often mirror a corresponding complexity within, according to many people who write about government organizations. Interest groups, congressional committees, and elements of the executive branch form alliances with units and individuals inside a particular agency and jealously defend these relationships. Consequently, many large government agencies become highly diverse confederations of groups and units whose relative independence weakens the authority of the politically appointed executives at the top (Seidman and Gilmour, 1986; Warwick, 1975).

Observers also say that the fact that the goals of public agencies are multiple, hard to specify and measure, and conflicting adds to this complexity. Often, two government agencies or two bureaus within a particular agency pursue diametrically opposed goals—conserve natural resources and develop natural resources for economic and recreational uses, enhance international trade but prevent the sale of sensitive technology—or have sharply differing priorities for a program for which they share responsibility.

For all these reasons, government often involves a particularly high frequency of power-sharing situations (Bryson and Einsweiller, 1995; Kettl, 1993). Many commentators note that government managers need a particularly high level of tolerance for ambiguity and diversity and must frequently deal with conflicts among diverse groups. Public managers must also deal with a particularly wide array of interests and parties. At the same time, government heavily emphasizes control and accountability, but it does so within a context in which clear performance measures such as profits and sales are not available to aid in assessing accountability and performance. The greater diversity in public organizations, they say, aggravates their tendency to emphasize reporting, record keeping, and requests for clearances from higher hierarchical levels. Even smaller units in government face intense requirements to report to higher levels as a result of the federal system of grants and contracts, requirements imposed by larger agencies and jurisdictions, and so on. The system has become an elaborate array of “centrifugal and centripetal” forces (Warwick, 1975) and “inevitable bureaucracy” (Lynn, 1981). More and more diversity, coupled with pressures for accountability but few clear performance measures, breeds a profusion of rules, regulations, clearances, and reporting requirements.

All this implies that public management typically involves great information intensity and information traffic. The tasks that public organizations carry out tend, of course, to be service-oriented and information-intensive. Careful studies of information handling in the public and private sectors have shown that public organizations do in fact involve greater information intensity, with private service organizations such as banks and insurance companies coming close to resembling them but actually falling into an intermediate range between industrial firms and public agencies (Bretschneider, 1990).

Tullock (1965) developed a pessimistic theoretical argument about the effects of this governmental context on communication and the flow of information. He argued that the size and complexity of government bureaus create information leakage as lower-level officials communicate up the hierarchy. The officials must summarize the information they report upward and screen the information they receive from lower levels before transmitting it upward. This process deletes much of the information. And in addition to simply boiling down the information, they report the information that is most favorable to them and screen out unfavorable information. This leads to substantial distortions in upward communications in public bureaucracies, according to Tullock. He argued that private firms are better able to avoid such problems because their higher levels use such measures as sales and profits to prevent the lower levels from inaccurately reporting information about their activities.

Downs (1967) elaborated Tullock’s observations into a more complex set of hypotheses. According to Downs, most communication in bureaus is subformal. Subformal communication increases with greater interdependence among activities, with uncertainty, and with time pressure, but decreases between subunits in sharp conflict with one another. Newer, fast-growing, changing bureaus have less effective communication networks than do older, more stable ones. Information moving up the hierarchy becomes distorted for the reasons that Tullock described, and successful high-level officials use various strategies to counteract this distortion. They develop informal channels of information outside the bureau and set up overlapping responsibilities inside the bureau to create redundant internal channels. They employ counterbiasing, which means they adjust their own reactions to information from lower levels in ways that counter the biases they know the reports contain. For example, they reduce reliance on information about future events or qualitative factors. In agencies with many crises and much specialization, they bypass levels to get the “straight scoop” from lower levels. They seek to develop distortion-proof information systems, especially when precise accuracy and rapid transmission are very important and when there is a “tall” hierarchy and important variables are quantifiable. This characterization of the public sector setting, together with preceding ones, if correct, means that communications in the public sector are more intensive and difficult than in the private sector, with conflicts more likely to occur and more difficult to manage.

Yet little explicit comparative research has assessed this view. Although researchers have examined communications in public agencies (Warwick, 1975), such studies cannot resolve the question of whether large private firms would show the same characteristics and processes. Searches performed for this book located few public-private comparative studies explicitly dealing with groups, communication, and conflict. In one, Boyatzis (1982) found that a sample of public managers showed lower levels of skill at managing group processes than private sector managers did. In another, Baum and James (1984) compared the responses of 2,300 employees from nine “clearly public” and five “clearly private” organizations to the International Communications Association communications audit survey questionnaire. On most of these questions, the respondents in the public organizations scored less favorably than did the private sector employees. On almost every item about information received and sent, they felt they received and sent less and needed to send and receive more than the private sector respondents. They also scored lower on each of thirty-two questions about organizational climate (concerning relations with coworkers, supervisors, and subordinates; satisfaction with work, pay, communication, and other factors; and quality of products and services). As with the satisfaction studies discussed in Chapter Ten, the public sector respondents expressed reasonably high satisfaction on many of these items but scored lower than private sector respondents. Baum and James concluded that public managers face greater challenges in establishing effective communications and must work harder at it.

Schwenk (1990) compared the perceptions of forty executives from for-profit (FP) and not-for-profit (NFP) organizations regarding conflict surrounding decision making in their organizations. All the executives found conflict unpleasant, but the FP executives felt that conflict diminished the quality and clarity of decisions, and they found it more unpleasant than the NFP executives. The NFP executives reported a positive association between conflict and the quality and clarity of decisions. In describing their decisions, the FP executives much more frequently mentioned criteria related to financial performance—a finding consistent with that of Solomon (1986)—whereas the NFP managers more often mentioned the needs of constituents and the speed and effectiveness of service delivery.

Schwenk (1990) also analyzed the executives’ descriptions of their decisions, using the decision framework developed by Mintzberg, Raisinghani, and Theoret (1976) described in Chapter Seven. He found that conflict in the NFP organizations more often occurred in the early phases of the decision-making process (the phases concerned with problem recognition and diagnosis) and that NFP decision-making processes involved more steps and more “recycles,” in which the decision process cycles back to an earlier phase. In the FP decision-making processes, conflict tended to occur later, in the phase involving evaluation and choice of alternatives. The NFP executives apparently regarded conflict as useful in clarifying diverse criteria and the demands of diverse interests and constituencies, particularly in the recognition and diagnosis of problems. Although the sample for the Schwenk study was not large, the findings tend to reflect the organizational context of public organizations described earlier in this and in other chapters. They also tend to concur with other researchers’ findings about decision-making processes in public organizations compared to private ones (Hickson and others, 1986; Solomon, 1986).

In sum, much theory and some expert observation hold that public organizations face greater complexity and more potential problems in group relations, communication, and conflict resolution than private organizations. Little direct comparative evidence supports these observations, but the few studies that do provide evidence about them tend to show greater complexity and problems. This conclusion should not be overstated and overgeneralized, however. The interpretation that the private sector performs better on these dimensions is too simple and easy. Previous chapters, and Chapters Thirteen and Fourteen, show numerous examples of effective public management involving strong and productive communication. The public sector may face greater challenges precisely because of the nature of government as an arena for the complex policymaking decisions and political choices of an advanced political economy. Yet, as the review in this chapter has shown, the literature phrases the issues and prescriptions at a high level of generality, making them applicable to public, private, and nonprofit organizations. Public managers may not need knowledge and skills significantly different from those covered here, but they do need particularly well-developed knowledge and skills in this area. For effective communication in public agencies, there are now well-developed frameworks, guidelines, and advice for public managers (Garnett, 1992; Graber, 2003).