Organizational Politics: From Conflict-Suppression to Rational Conflict-Management

The political analysis of organisations has gained increasing significance in the last 10 years. In the Anglo-American research in particular the most significant and up-to-date questions from the broad research field of Organizational Politics, have been taken up and examined from a scientific perspective that is essentially empirical. Much attention has been paid to the phenomena of power, the generation and handling of conflict in organisations (with emphasis on the managerial viewpoint), as well as to industrial conflict as a conflict between employers and trade unions. Interesting research results have been achieved in these areas, which can also be found in the German literature. Despite this progress, no consensus can yet be traced in the existing literature upon the definition of the object of research, the problem formulation and the research goal. In view of the different perspectives of the object of research that exist, the integration of multiple research results presents difficulties: the advantage of cooperative, particularly international research results cannot be exploited to the full, and as a result of the absence of a complete research "road map", gaps in the research are discovered more by chance, rather than being identified and elaborated systematically. Furthermore, the economic problems of power, conflict and conflict-handling, which are of great significance for business corporations have received surprisingly little attention. Another weakness is the rather loose relationship that exists with Political Science, which provides important impetus, but which is as yet unsufficiently used as a permanent corresponding discipline.