15 - Honor and conflict management in corporate life

Summary

The grey-suited managers directing large corporations seem unlikely practitioners of elaborate honor ceremonies. A top manager from Kanter's (1977, p. 48) study of a large corporation, for example, portrayed his executive offices as a “brain center, but there is no activity. It's like an old folks’ home. You can see the cobwebs growing. A secretary every quarter of a mile. It's very sterile.” Moore's (1962, p. 127) observations on executive conflict echo these sentiments: “Let us understand, this is a discussion among gentlemen, not a barroom brawl. The decor and the demeanor require restraint. This is civilized combat, not the law of the jungle.” The images evoked by Kanter, Moore, and studies by Dalton (1959) and Macaulay (1963) suggest a buttoned-down culture in American corporate suites.

Such an expectation might accurately characterize corporate executive suites prior to the 1980s. Since that time two significant developments have disrupted the traditional social structures and “rules of the game” among top management: (1) widespread restructuring of corporate management, particularly experimentation with “matrix” management; and (2) the diffusion of hostile takeovers and their symbolic imagery. In this chapter I explore the impacts of these developments on top managers through the symbolic refraining of their conflict management in a large corporation.

Conflict management refers to any social process by which people or groups handle grievances about each other's behaviors (see generally, Black 1984, 1990; Nader and Todd 1978). At a theoretical level, the essay illustrates the utility of cross-cultural theories of conflict management for understanding behavior in organizational contexts. The study also suggests the concurrent importance of both social structural and symbolic factors enacted either purposively or conjuncturally in explaining organizational change.