Managing Conflict in Organizations - Paperback

by M. Afzalur Rahim (Author)

Managing Conflict in Organizations introduces the origins, forms, benefits, and consequences of organizational conflict to students and practitioners and teaches how best to manage conflict to achieve productive outcomes. Conflict has benefits: it may lead to solutions to problems, creativity, and innovation. In contrast, little or no conflict in organizations may lead to stagnation, poor decisions, and ineffectiveness.

This book is a vigorous analysis of the rational application of conflict theory in organizations for organizational behavior students, as well as practitioners looking to practice constructive conflict management in their work. This fifth edition has been thoroughly updated to reflect the latest research in the field and explains the effect that research has on practice, with an expanded range of practical examples and cases.

It covers emergent topics such as:

• Differentials in conflict management styles across generations
• Technology and its effect on conflict style changes
• Cross-cultural studies and diversity

This text is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and researchers in human resource management and organizational behavior, and a practical handbook for practitioners that manage (or manage upward) their colleagues.

Author Biography

M. Afzalur Rahim (Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh) is a University Distinguished Professor of Management, emeritus, and Hays Watkins Research Fellow, Western Kentucky University. He is also the Founding Editor of Applied Management Journal (formerly Current Topics in Management) and is the founder of the International Journal of Organizational Analysis, International Journal of Conflict Management, International Association for Conflict Management, International Association for Applied Management (formerly International Conference on Advances in Management), and Bangladesh Academy of Business Administration. Dr. Rahim has 25 edited books and five for which he is the sole author. He has published 75 journal articles, 53 book chapters, and presented over 100 papers at various conferences. The published works involve 70 different coauthors. He has also produced onemanuals and 16 measurement instruments. In the organizational sciences Dr. Rahim has over 16,900 Google citations. His articles were published, among others, in the Academy of Management Journal, Intelligence, Journal of Applied Psychology, Journal of Management, and Multivariate Behavioral Research. His current research interests are in the areas of cross-cultural conflict management, leaders' emotional, cultural, and social intelligence.