Should you blow up your human resource office? With tongue somewhat in cheek, this nitro approach to organizational redesign was recently advocated by Thomas Stewart of Fortune. Having attracted readers' attention with this proposal, he later announced that human resources has come to the proverbial fork in the road. One path leads to the traditional functional services, such as staffing, labor relations, training and development, and compensation. The other path leads to a new role as a member of the management team, helping the firm to be competitive in today's environment. To compete effectively, companies are downsizing, restructuring, streamlining operations, cutting costs, and employing diverse work forces. These steps, along with such daily operations as meeting production goals, generate conflicts, many of which are being routed to human resource managers.

Conflict Management Techniques

To investigate the HR managers' approaches to handling disputes, we relied on a procedure previously used in studying community, organizational, and legal dispute resolution. After each manager recalled the steps taken to handle the conflict, the transcripts were passed to two expert raters, who independently scored the steps, or techniques, by placing each into one of the categories listed in Figure 1. The raters agreed on the classifications for 91 percent of the managers' techniques; when differences occurred, the raters conferred and arrived at mutually acceptable classifications for these steps.

Figure 1 Techniques Used In The Disputes And Extent Of Use

  * Meet separately with the disputants                HIGH
  * Gather information about the dispute               FREQUENCY
  * Listen to a disputant's ideas and opinions
  * Gather information from third parties
  * Propose concessions or specific agreements

  * Meet with a disputant, along with a third party    MODERATE
  * State one disputant's point of view to other       FREQUENCY
    disputant(s)
  * Assist the disputants in some manner
  * Advise or persuade disputants as to how they
    should generally think or behave
  * Analyze the situation and attempt to group the
    causes of the dispute
  * Threaten the disputant(s)
  * Meet together with both or all disputants
  * Provide objective data about the conflict
  * Make statements to calm the disputants
  * Quote a rule or law

  * Criticize a disputant                              LOW
  * Have a third party assist in the dispute           FREQUENCY
  * Praise or compliment a disputant
  * Call for an apology
  * Ask for empathy or understanding of the other
    side
  * Have disputants sign a written agreement
  * Use logic to convince a disputant

* Angry worker shouts obscenities at group leader, then threatens production managers and HR managers

* Man makes inappropriate comments about female colleague's undergarments

Appropriate Conflict Management?

This tally of the importance of the disputes as well as the review of the types of issues indicate that HR managers are not simply putting out fires at management's behest. Nor are they providing traditional services. Rather, they are resolving issues of central importance to the firm. In light of this importance, the answer to our final issue becomes quite salient: Do HR managers use the correct approaches? A bottom-line measure in our study indicates they do: 71 percent of the disputes were reported to have been settled successfully.

Other criteria for judging the quality of the managers' approaches can be drawn from conflict management literature. For the most part, researchers agree that when assisting disputants, third parties should be:

1. Informed. They should gather enough information so as to understand the dispute; likewise, they should use such information to diagnose the conflict and its underlying causes.

2. Assertive. They should become active players in resolving the dispute and should address the problem before it has time to escalate.

3. Objective. They should be neutral and impartial, objectively weighing the various causes and solutions to the dispute.

4. Flexible. They should modify their approaches to fit the situation, rather than rigidly applying the same solution to all conflicts.