Cooperation vs. Conflict: Best Management Approach for Knowledge Development

Introduction

Understanding business, and what that process contains, is extremely complex. It takes years of study and focus to gain even a rudimentary idea of all a company has to do to remain viable. A company must have employees who understand their jobs, clear work goals for all concerned, accounting practices that accurately reflect the company's finances, and many other processes running across every level of the organization. Threads run through all of an organization's working practices that tend to bind it together. These threads can be tangible communication channels — email, phone lines, and other forms of information technology — or they can be intangible. These intangible communication lines represent another layer of complexity that managers must control and shape. How people deal with one another is the way an organization actually functions, because people are the true glue that holds a company together more than any other single asset. People also add the most complexity to the organization, and how they are managed largely determines the relative success or failure of an enterprise.

The members of an organization provide the knowledge upon which it is based, and they can absorb further knowledge that will help sustain the company. Knowledge development and management are critical because an industry is always changing as processes improve, and an organization must continually develop its knowledge base or it will fail. Management of employees with regard to knowledge development is equally crucial, but determining how to manage that development can be daunting. Encouraging cooperation among participants is one way to generate knowledge, but fostering some amount of conflict also helps the knowledge base grow. This paper examines these two methods of developing knowledge and attempts to determine which process is the more efficient approach according to existing research.

The central question is: in order to achieve the best outcomes for knowledge development, what management approach is best — one that encourages cooperation between staff, or one that encourages conflict? Three terms must be more clearly understood before an analysis can be conducted: knowledge development, cooperation between staff, and conflict between staff.

Knowledge can be simply defined as "awareness or learning" (Knowledge), but the development of this concept is more involved. Knowledge — sometimes called intellectual capital, meaning "nonfinancial measures and other related information" (Moon & Kym) — development implies that there must be a method by which knowledge is acquired; it is not necessarily something the individual possessed previously. The management aspect of knowledge development involves assisting individuals to continuously acquire knowledge that will benefit the entire organization, whether by helping them experience different aspects of the organization or by giving them the means to educate themselves (Cohen). This acquisition can come through either cooperation or conflict.

Definitions

The cooperation aspect has been the most studied in the emerging field of knowledge management (Mischen & Jackson). Cooperation among employees means that they share the knowledge they possess and try to improve the overall knowledge base in any way they can. Researchers have examined this under such frameworks as community of practice (Liu & Fisher) and social network analysis (Mischen & Jackson). It might seem intuitive that people learn more readily from willing colleagues, but this is not always the case.

Throughout the history of organizations, companies have specifically worked to pit departments, groups, or individuals against one another for the betterment of the entire company (Morris, Kocak & Ozer). This is not a combative practice, but one in which groups work against each other to improve the knowledge base for the good of the whole. Many examples of this practice exist within technology companies. One specific example is the individual work that Bell Labs scientists conducted to produce many early innovations, including the transistor. This style of management may seem counterintuitive, but only if the conflict and competition do not ultimately result in an addition to the company's total knowledge.

Conflict can also arise directly in meetings and workgroups. When people experience a degree of conflict between individuals, they may be better able to arrive at a positive outcome (Fischler). Sometimes what appears to be a viable solution is not, and what seems to be a detriment turns out to be exactly what the company needed to add to its knowledge base (Fischler).

Research has had much to say about fostering cooperation among employees to grow an organization's knowledge. This idea stems from the belief that an organization is not merely a collection of individuals, but an interconnected whole in which each individual adds to the knowledge base as they work within the group structure. One group of researchers studied how the formation of alliances improves a company's knowledge base:

"Recently, there is an escalating number of academic literature that suggests that the achievement of benefits from alliances is closely related to the ability of the partners to share knowledge and learn from each other. Organisations are increasingly employing strategic alliances to quickly learn new knowledge to speed up the rate of innovation in response to meeting diverse and changing customers' demands and needs. Such joint cooperation enforces partners to create an environment not only to enhance the development of their own core competencies to achieve their objectives, but also to enable the development of new knowledge." (Suseno & Ratten)

Cooperation vs. Conflict

The authors of this study found that organizations encouraged people to form working alliances — not exclusionary cliques, but productive partnerships — because of the clear benefits gained. The greatest benefit of these alliances appears to be that employees both raised the overall corporate knowledge level, because everyone came to share what others knew, and also enabled individual employees to innovate, fostering the creation of entirely new knowledge.

Within an organization, creating cooperative alliances might mean that people from different departments working on a multi-disciplinary project collaborate closely (Liu & Fisher). This helps develop knowledge because each department brings a distinct knowledge base to the effort. Even employees with very different responsibilities can share what they know to enhance someone else's development. Since most projects require input from many different areas, employees who work together — rather than simply supplying their isolated portion of a project — tend to generate greater overall knowledge development within the company.

Research supports these findings as well. In a study aimed at widening the knowledge of nurses, Sandra Ward, a PhD in nursing, argued that incorporating a new model of care (in this case, the Common Sense Model) was "an excellent heuristic for integrating findings from diverse lines of research and because it can generate new research in nursing." This means that developing shared knowledge among nurses will in turn create more knowledge as further research is conducted and nurses apply the concept in practice. The same has been found to be true within individual organizations. In fact, this kind of cooperation does not always occur within a single organization; it may occur between different entities within the same industry (Morris, Kocak & Ozer). Smaller organizations in particular can develop knowledge more rapidly by working with others in their market — an idea that extends to different departments within a single organization increasing knowledge through cooperation rather than through strict conflict and competition (Morris, Kocak & Ozer).

The flip side of cooperation is conflict. It may seem counterintuitive to believe that conflict can be on par with cooperation in expanding an organization's knowledge base. However, significant research suggests exactly that.

Conflict within an organization can stem from many internal and external sources. At a broad level, knowledge is often developed through necessity when external conflict threatens a company. Many world-changing technologies would never have been developed without the extreme pressures of war. In this way, an external force compels a group of people to increase their knowledge in order to meet a threat. The atomic age itself was born because German and American scientists were racing against each other to develop an ultimate solution to a conflict.

Organizations experience analogous external pressures when a competitor creates a new product that revolutionizes an industry. The rapid rush to replicate Apple's iPad is a clear example of this phenomenon. Many companies released their own tablet computers because a direct competitor had achieved financial success through technological innovation, compelling others to develop their own knowledge and capabilities in response.

At the organizational level, Porter et al. found that conflict encourages the growth of knowledge within an organization. Individuals appeared to thrive on the competition and conflict created within certain organizational structures, and this dynamic increased the knowledge development of the entire organization (Porter, Lyon, Adamu, & Obafemi). Their research was conducted in African marketplaces, but similar findings have been documented in larger organizations in the West.

In Using Conflict in Organizations, the authors discuss the dangers of groupthink (de Dreu & Vliert, 53). NASA is one of the largest government-sponsored organizations in the United States, and it has experienced both monumental successes and devastating failures. Among the failures are those that occurred because scientists within the organization had grown too confident in their knowledge and were blinded to problems with their products. In 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after launch, killing all astronauts on board. The engineers involved later realized that they had allowed cooperative consensus to blind them to the problem of faulty O-rings. In 1992, the same agency launched the Hubble Space Telescope. When it failed to perform as designed, investigators found that scientists working closely together had dismissed a known problem without fully investigating it. The authors argue:

"When groups are susceptible to groupthink, their goals are transformed from the pursuit of effective problem resolution (i.e., identifying possible problems, evaluating different alternatives) to the suppression of conflict at all costs (i.e., launch despite any concerns or contradictory indications)." (de Dreu & Vliert, 53)

It is clear that in these cases, a voice of constructive conflict would have introduced an element that added to overall knowledge and counteracted the groupthink that can emerge when cooperation goes unchecked.

Conclusion

A manager who understands that conflict is not a negative force to be suppressed at all costs will be better positioned to increase organizational knowledge than a manager who relies solely on cooperation. There must be some element of conflict, and this is especially productive when knowledge is being developed, because people are more receptive to conflict when a new idea needs to be introduced than when cooperation is needed to complete an established process (Fischler).