Multidimensional Conflict and Organizational Performance

Abstract

Conflict is part of every organization. Scholars have studied the effects of conflict on organization dynamics and their outputs. Literature suggests that not all conflict is detrimental for organizations—some conflict actually helps bolster and refresh organizations. One concern for organizations is the vertical strategic alignment of management strategies. Vertical cohesion or conflict impacts an organization’s ability to reach optimal performance. In the setting of English local governments, this study uses vertical strategic differences among two levels of management as the measure of conflict in organizations to examine, one, how it impacts organization performance, and two, if conflict has a nonlinear relationship with performance. Results indicate that conflict on single strategies has no bearing on organization performance. Total strategy or multidimensional conflict, however, negatively impacts performance. There is little support for a nonlinear relationship between conflict and performance. Further analyses indicate that the negative impact of conflict is amplified for smaller organizations.