To posess the role of a pacifying hippie

Abstract

A large part of the academic literature on conflicts in organizations focuses on con flicts between individuals and conflict management as individual skills. This article presents opportunities and challenges when the work environment organization and the work council jointly take an active and systematic role in the prevention of harmful conflicts in the workplace. We present results from an action research project with 12 ongoing workshops and a competence development course at four workplaces on cooperation on conflicts. The results from the project indicate that individual skills are necessary to take on the role of mediators in conflict management, but that these skills are not sufficient to drive the systematic prevention of conflicts in the workplace. The project shows that conflicts can be reduced when management, work environment representatives, and shop stewards agree on a legitimate system with the distribution of roles and tasks in both handling and preventing conflicts. We present dilemmas and shifts in positioning when management and worker representatives create capacity at the system level to identify, analyze, and initiate actions at the organizational level to drive conflict prevention towards a professional culture of disagreement.