Management of conflict

Conflict is an essential ingredient of any walk of life — especially business life. To pretend that it does not exist is to blind oneself to reality and thereby reduce one's management effectiveness. In fact if conflict did not exist, managerial decision‐making would become unnecessary and we would no longer need any managers. Apart from being inevitable, conflict should not be regarded as entirely undesirable either. It provides differences of viewpoint and opinion, creating situations from which we can extract learning, and is the source of most new ideas.