Conflict Management CM

Track Description

Diversity is increasing within organisations at an astronomical rate. Organisations are increasingly operating in multicultural, multinational contexts, building strategic alliances, exporting work and facilitating mergers and acquisitions inside and outside their primary domain of work. Concurrently, organisations are implementing work groups with greater frequency to integrate the knowledge of workers across broad geographic locations and cultural contexts. However, although there is a scarcity of literature on multinational groupwork, disagreement exists regarding whether a diverse cultural composition of groups leads to positive or negative group outcomes.

We argue that the main explanation for the mixed, inconclusive results may be that such studies draw on a positivist conceptualisation of national culture. To trully push the field forward, we argue that a more explicit consideration of group context is critical, with a particular emphasis on the cultural context. To facilitate this, we move away from the traditional way of modelling culture as a homogeneous entity and we conceptualise culture as a group rather than a national or organisational consideration. In this sense, cultures are perceived as systems of meaning created within and between groups of people in their interface with each other. Based on such a conceptualisation, the multinational scenario could be managed as a distinctly 'group' and 'inter­group' phenomenon. This requires detailed consideration of how individuals interface with groups, what happens to individuals when they become group members, how groups tend to interface with each other, what can go wrong and why, and how in particular the Human Resource (HR) professional can actively reflect on and manage these interface processes. Such a framework is essential both to empirical research on theoretical models designed to understand determinants of multinational group effectiveness and to the implementation of groups in multinationals. This is particularly true given that one of the most underestimated elements of inter­cultural working is the pivotal role of categorisation and identity processes, both of which can have a profound effect on perception, attitudes, emotions and behaviours. It is via these processes that the role of culture can be understood to impact on attitude and behaviour, and by actively managing these processes intergroup blocks to effective multinational alliance can be eliminated or contained.

The objective of this track is to contribute to a promising future for the development of a truly relational perspective around cross­cultural organizational issues and workgroup effectiveness. This articulation will identify conceptual and empirical lacunae and thus highlight new directions for future research. Our understanding of relationality and basic relational processes will advance, as will our understanding of workgroups in dynamic, continuous and processual terms. Conducting research that breaks out of the traditional single level micro or macro framework provides a more comprehensive and more realistic way of thinking about organizations and people in them. By realizing the potential of the relational perspective we can begin to develop more integrated theories of behaviour in and of organizations.

For information on how to submit papers please see the 2008 European Academy of Management conference website: http://www.euram2008.org/

Please note that the closing deadline for submissions is 27 January 2008. 

Queries should be directed to Dr Olivia Kyriakidou (o.kyriakidou@aegean.gr),

Best regards,

Track Chairs

Dr Olivia Kyriakidou

Assistant Professor in Organisational Behavior

Department of Business Administration

Athens University of Economics and Business

Patision 80, Greece

Tel: +210 7623790

E-mail: o.kyriakidou@aegean.gr

Dr Lynne Millward

Senior Lecturer

University of Surrey
School of Human Sciences
Department of Psychology
Surrey, GU2 7XH, UK
Tel: +44 1483 689442
E-mail: l.purvis@surrey.ac.uk

Chrisa Gizari