People have different ways of interpreting the events they come across in their daily life. School and family circumstances, encounters at the workplaces, clubs, religions, friends, society, and occupations influence most of the understandings. Employment is one of the elements that influence people’s life.
Hence, management and the nature of employment are some of the issues that trigger heated debates. Generally, people have two different perspectives of interpreting managerial practices that take place at workplaces. These are known as unitarism and pluralism.
The unitarist approach holds that workplace conflicts are avoidable. According to this approach, managers may detour them by bringing all the stakeholders together. They can and should make sure that an organization is managed from a single source of power.
Meanwhile, pluralists hold that workplace conflicts are inevitable. Managers ought to convert them into profitable initiatives rather than criticize them.
Unitarists base their arguments on postulations that workplace conflict is an avoidable feature of relationships between employees and their managers. They claim that as long as managers continue interacting with employees, they are likely to quarrel.
This new CEO is clearly of the unitarist perspective on management and organizational development (OD). This style of management focuses on economic gain, if it saves money, then it is a credible strategy for management action. By focusing on a metric of 15 minutes, the CEO can optimize the number of patients seen by providers in any given day. This allows for increasing numbers, assuming that the metrics can be met and that care and quality patient time don’t cause delays.
By making the choice to focus on the metrics, rather than the underlying needs of patients and providers to have a symbiotic relationship, the CEO is ignoring the organizational behavior (OB) practices in the organization and that is what is leading to the exodus of practitioners from the organization.
Research has shown that organizations that value their employees and have strong OB characteristics are more profitable than those that do not. Organizational behavior integrates well with the pluralist view of management which is where organizations are looked at as social constructs where integration of goals and aspirations of everyone makes the organization fully successful.
The unitarist approach to management really came into practice at the turn of the last century when major technological leaps were being experienced by the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and France. There were large scale production models being developed and the core principals of industrialism were developed.
The general operating model emerged as the bureaucracy that we know today. This involved structuring resources by specialty and dividing the process of production into discrete parts. This approach worked to advance large scale capitalism throughout the world and to improve and protect the economic dominance of the establishment.
According to the unitarists, organisations ought to have a single source of authority. All instructions ought to come from the management team (Ross & Bamber 2009). Managers are supposed to treat employees in a manner that tries to suppress internal conflict over power by ensuring that it does not allocate powers to individual employees.
Pluralists hold that conflicts at workplaces are inevitable, which contradicts the unitarists’ position who believes that it is possible for institutions to circumvent conflict at workplaces. Pluralists perceive business organisations as intricate social constructions that comprise of groups of people with conflicting interests.
Employees and the management form part of these groups (Giles 1998). Based on the nature of the organisation’s system, employees and management are seen to pledge to different objectives and values. Based on this perspective, pluralists believe that it is hard to do away with different sources of power within a business institution.
For this reason, organisations cannot overcome conflicts. By acknowledging that organisations are incapable of overcoming conflicts, the pluralists consider conflict to be of significant benefit to an organisation (Giles 1998). It acts as the conduit through which employees present their problems.
Moreover, they posit that whenever the management senses that conflict might erupt in an organisation, they work towards coming up with innovative methods that would turn the conflict into a productive initiative.
Pluralists assert that learning that trade unions and shop stewards are likely to cause trouble in an organisation leaves the management at a better position to address the issues of employee relations in a holistic manner.
Unlike the unitarists who do not see the role of trade unions in organisations, pluralists believe that trade unions play a significant role in bringing sanity into an organisation. According to pluralists, organisations are more susceptible to conflicts than harmony.
Managers follow different reference points when executing their management exercises. Two of such reference points are the unitarist and the pluralist managerial perspectives. The two perspectives have different opinions regarding organisational management. Unitarist holds that workplace conflict is avoidable.
Therefore, the unitarist perspective calls for the establishment of a single source of power and integration of organisational and employee interests.
They believe that workplace conflicts come because of different employee interests. Moreover, unitarists believe that employees do not need having trade unions, as the unions add to workplace conflicts. On the other hand, pluralist managerial perspective holds that workplace conflicts are inevitable.
According to pluralists, it is hard for organisations to curb workplace conflicts. Therefore, the organisational management team needs to look for the opportunities that might help it to use the emerging conflicts to boost organisational growth. Pluralists view workplace conflicts in a positive dimension.
They believe that the conflicts help the management to unravel the underlying tensions, therefore, helping them to come up with measures to mitigate them. Between the two perspectives, pluralist managerial perspective is the better.
The perspective acknowledges that it is hard for an organisation to overcome workplace conflicts and it gives a method of embracing the conflict in a productive way.
