Managerial perception of organizational conflicts: Does it have an impact on outcomes?

Abstract

Organizational Conflicts have been an attentive area for researchers in the field of management. That has resulted in accumulating an extensive body of literature broadening the understanding of Organizational Conflicts in managerial perspective. Researches are divided in their views on the outcomes of organizational conflicts, while some of them argue that organizational conflicts are dysfunctional to the organization, the rest claims that organizational conflicts bring positive outcomes to some level. One of the aspects they have pointed out is that the outcome of the conflict depends on the managers’ perception and the way of managing them. This study examined the perception of managers on organizational conflicts and its outcomes in the garment industry in Sri Lanka. A sample of 200 managers was selected as the sample of the study from the garment sector. Two questioners namely “Perception of Organizational Conflict Measure (POCM), and Conflict Outcome Measure (COM), developed and tested by the researches, were administered among sample managers to collect data on perception of conflicts and their outcomes. Hypotheses were formulated based on the conceptual model, developed through an extensive literature review. The test of multivariate correlation was used to test the hypothesis of the study. It was revealed that negative perception of organizational conflicts by managers, correlates significantly with negative out comes (r= -0.623, p= 0.001) while positive perception of conflicts bears positive outcomes in the garment industry (r= 0.523, p= 0.000). But no evidence was found to claim any association between the perception of conflicts and the level of outcomes.