The purpose of the paper is to examine effects of organization's public relationship and power relationship on conflict management strategy and willingness to resolve conflict. Particularly, the paper looks at how public relationship the PR talks of i...
The purpose of the paper is to examine effects of organization's public relationship and power relationship on conflict management strategy and willingness to resolve conflict. Particularly, the paper looks at how public relationship the PR talks of is related to organizational power relationships in social dimension. In the process, the paper focused on NGOs which have especially many experiences in conflicts and whose social meanings become serious.
To do this, the paper formed research questions on how organization's public relationship and power relationship, the independent variables, affect conflict management strategy and willingness to resolve conflict, the dependent variables.
To prove research question, the paper distinguished organization's public relationship into trust, satisfaction, commitment, mutual control, public relationship, and exchange relationship; the paper distinguished four types of organization's power relationship as procedural power, substantive power, psychological power, and legitimacy power; and distinguished conflict management strategy into integrative strategy, separate strategy, and avoidance strategy. Then, the paper distributed surveys to NGOs staffs who were thoroughly aware of the conflict situation. 124 staffs' survey data were analyzed by ANOVA and regression analysis. Research results deduced from this examination of previous studies and analyses can largely be summarized into four parts.
First, it was found that the use of organization's integrative strategy and willingness to resolve conflict could be increased through commitment and procedural power. Further, as NGOs staffs perceive that the opponent's commitment and public relationship are high, willingness to resolve conflicts grew higher. Further, even if substantive power, such as coercion, remuneration power, ability to control resources, and ability to conceive of alternatives to negotiation, is high, one can increase use of organization's integrative strategy and willingness to resolve conflict if public relationship is good.
Second, use of organization's distributive strategy was influenced by trust, public relationship, and exchange relationship among attributes of public relationship, and among types of power relationship, it was influenced by substantive power. In the case of substantive power, as NGOs staffs consider that their coercion, compensation power, ability to control resources, and ability to conceive of alternatives to negotiation, as high, their use of distributive strategy decreases. Based on this discussion, the paper arrived at a conclusion that in conflict situation, NGO’s staff can decrease the use of distributive strategy by increasing substantive power themselves.
Third, attributes of public relationship that showed certain relation to avoidance strategy were in exchange relationship with satisfaction, and among it, as exchange relationship got high, the use of avoidance strategy increased. In other words, as NGOs’ benefits per investment cost on the opponent get high, integrative strategy is used less, but instead, avoidance strategy is used more. Further, as NGOs perceive that their coercion power and ability to control resources are higher than the opponents, their use of avoidance strategy increases as well.
Fourth, organization's conflict management strategy was found to have relation to willingness to resolve conflict. More concretely, integrative strategy and avoidance strategy were found to have positive correlation, and distributive strategy was found to have negative correlation. It was also found that organizations that use integrative strategy increased their willingness to resolve conflicts by not only listening to their satisfaction, but also to opponents' satisfaction and necessity. Moreover, distributive strategy, that concerns only one side's assertion to be carried in win-lose circumstance, decreases willingness to resolve conflict.
The paper is meaningful in that it realistically attempted to tackle conflict and power relationship, not oftentimes tackled in existing PR studies, based on researches of other scholarships, and the fact that it complemented PR scholarship's criticism that it was limited to microscopic and functional viewpoints, and carried discussion in macroscopic and critical aspects. In practical affairs aspect, the paper found relationship between PR's public relationship and power relationship, and conflict management strategy, which, in turn, provided implication on deducing realistic conflict management strategy.