Designing a Conflict Management System for Higher Education: A Case Study for Design in Integrative Organizations

Published date01 October 2014
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1002/crq.21102
Date01 October 2014
C R Q, vol. 32, no. 1, Fall 2014 83
© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. and the Association for Confl ict Resolution
Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/crq.21102
Designing a Con ict Management System for
Higher Education: A Case Study for Design in
Integrative Organizations
Doug Yarn
In 1994, the Univ ersity System of Georgia embarked on an ambitious
eff ort to reduce the costs of disputing by creating what is now possi-
bly the largest comprehensive, integrated confl ict management system
(ICMS) in higher education. For almost twenty years, the Consortium
on Negotiation an d Confl ict Resolution has provided technical advice
and support for this initiative.  is article reviews the context, sum-
marizes the ICMS design, draws a few lessons, and speculates on the
value of this work. Because of my close personal involvement, I am
straying from convention and telling this story from the fi rst-person
perspective. Although probably skewed by hindsight, the historical
context is important because our decisions and actions refl ected the
prevailing conditions and our nascent level of knowledge and experi-
ence.  e overarching lessons are applicable to most organizations and
particularly salient for the confl ict management challenges facing the
diverse colleges and universities in the United States today and any
multifaceted, integrative organization.
By 1994, academic disputes had earned a particular notoriety long in the
making. Woodrow Wilson had observed that the intensity was inversely
proportional to the “triviality” of the particular issue or, as summed up in
Sayre’s law, after the political scientist William Sayre, “ e politics of the
university are so intense because the stakes are so low” (Shapiro 2006, 670).
From personal experience, I argue that the stakes can be rather large.
e opinions in this article are my own and are not necessarily those of the Consortium on
Negotiation and Confl ict Resolution or the University System of Georgia.
84 YARN
C R Q • DOI: 10.1002/crq
In the early 1970s, my anthropology department divided bitterly over
a theoretical issue that, although seemingly trivial, would eventually dic-
tate the department’s future and mine. As president of the anthropology
students’ union (it was a Marxist-tinged era), I was trapped in the political
maelstrom of this dispute and ultimately forced to abandon graduate study.
ere were many victims—other students, faculty members, a couple of
secretaries, and my favorite lemurs. Several promising scholars left.  ere
were grievances fi led and the inevitable lawsuit, but the economic costs
were dwarfed by the relational costs of a dysfunctional department mired
in controversy and beset with continuing acrimony among colleagues.
Change the players, the issue, and some of the context, and this could
be the scenario in any given government or corporate department or in any
number of public and private organizations, minus the lemurs. At some
level, a university is just another social organization in which confl ict is
inevitable. Like many others, it is also a workplace with typical workplace
disputes being resolved well, poorly, or not at all. And yet there is some-
thing unique about confl ict and disputing in higher education institutions
(HEIs). Ask any business executive who sought a cushy career change to
college administration.
A real campus has fundamentally diff erent structural characteristics
from a corporate campus in ways that would confound an experienced
business executive. Usually businesses are purposive organizations with a
clear single purpose, but HEIs are integrative organizations (Temple 2008)
with missions that not only diff er from those of businesses but are often
multiple and competing. HEIs are organized along diff erent models and
operate under diff erent constraints. Governance and decision making is
dispersed among governing boards, administrative hierarchies, and vari-
ous faculty groups that have responsibility over their particular domains
(Birnbaum 1991).  ere are other stakeholders too: staff , students and
their parents, alumni, donors, and sports fans, among others. To com-
plicate matters further, none of these stakeholder groups are particularly
monolithic. A major university will consist of colleges (e.g., College of
Arts and Sciences, College of Business), which usually consist of numerous
academic departments. It will have various support service divisions, such
as physical plant, housing, food services, information technology, cam-
pus police, human resources, and legal aff airs. Members of these various
stakeholder groups will have diff erent interests, objectives, and resource
demands based on their suborganizational affi liations. Administrative lead-
ers integrate these disparate objectives for the benefi t of the whole and

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