Pondy's view in the "process of conflict".

Essay by hongmeiCollege, Undergraduate September 2003

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Pondy views conflict as a process consists of 5 stages - latent conflict, perceived conflict, felt conflict, manifest conflict and conflict aftermath. Managers can use Pondy's model to interpret and analyze a conflict situation and take action to resolve it.

In latent conflict, there's no outright conflict but there's a potential for several sources of conflict, such as interdependence, differences in goals and priorities, bureaucratic factors, incompatible performance criteria and competition for resources.

As organization differentiate, activities of different subunits are interdependent. Each subunit develops a desire for autonomy and begins to pursue goals and interests that it values over the goals of other subunits. Since the activities of the subunits are interdepedent, subunits' desire for autonomy leads to conflict between groups.

Differences in subunit orientation affect the way each division views the world and cause each subunit to pursue different goals that are often inconsistent or incompatible.

The potential for conflict arises once their goals become incompatible. This is because the goals of one subunit may affect the ability of anothe to achieve its goals.

Latent conflict may also arise by the way which task relationships develop in organizations. Conflict can occur because of status inconsistencies between different groups in the organization's bureaucracy. One of the bureaucratic conflict occurs between staff and line functions. A line function is directly involved in the production of the organizaion's outputs while staff functions advise and support the line function such as personnel and accounting.

In most organizations, people in line functions view themselves as the critical organizational resource and people in staff functions as secondary players. Thus, they always uses its status a the producer of goods and services to justiry putting its interests ahead of the other function's interests. This results in conflict.

Sometimes goals incapability are...