Interpersonal Conflict and Its Management in Information System Development

Abstract

De nombreux chercheurs oeuvrant dans différents domaines de la gestion jugent que les conflits forment un aspect important de la vie organisationnelle et qu'il est important de les étudier. Malgré ce fait, les conflits interpersonnels demeurent très peu étudiés dans le développement des systèmes d'information. En s'inspirant des caractéristiques identifiées en management et en comportement organisationnel, l'étude décrite dans ce rapport présente et teste un modèle de conflit interpersonnel et son influence sur le succès des projets d'informatisation. Les données de l'étude ont été recueillies par l'entremise des questionnaires auprès de 265 analystes (l'échantillon principal) et 272 utilisateurs (l'échantillon confirmatif) ayant participé à l'implantation de 162 projets d'informatisation. Les résultats obtenus indiquent que le conflit interpersonnel est composé de trois dimensions : désagrément, interférence et émotion négative. Par ailleurs, même si le style de gestion des conflits a un effet positif sur certaines variables de succès, il ne diminue pas l'impact négatif du conflit interpersonnel sur ces variables de succès. En d'autres mots, peu importe la façon dont il est géré ou résolu, le conflit interpersonnel est perçu comme ayant un impact négatif.

Toward an ‘IT Conflict-Resistance Theory’: action research during IT pre-implementation

“…These instances of resistance require the abortion of the ERP initially considered for a less impacting application on some specific process changes and on underlying power redistribution across groups of employees. Second, whereas conflicts toward IT are often considered as being required to be actively managed by the CEO (Markus et al, 2000a, b;Barki & Hartwick, 2001), our case study delivers an alternative observation. IT describes how a passive-like attitude of managers during the IT pre-implantation phase does not prevent the resolution of a socio-political oriented conflict between two groups of employees.…”

“…Burke (1970a, b) identifies five different management styles concerning conflict resolution. These conflict resolution modes have been validated and used in many management and IS projects (Marciniak, 1996;Barki & Hartwick, 2001), as well as virtual teams (Kankanhalli et al, 2006). We decided to adopt these five conflict resolution styles (see Table 2).…”

“…While acts of resistance concern forms of behaviours, conflicts are about the object of resistance and perceived threats (Lapointe & Rivard, 2005, p. 467). Several definitions made in Organisational Science (Putman & Poole, 1987), Psychology (Thomas, 1992) or IS (Barki & Hartwick, 2001) consider three conditions of conflicts: interdependence, interference and disagreement. By itself, each condition cannot be considered as a sufficient condition.…”

“…Among key factors associated with IT project failures, users' resistance is one of the most salient because it is related to human resistance to change ( Jiang et al, 2000b). Existing literature provides practical knowledge about conflict types and conflict management styles (Miranda & Bostrom, 1993;Markus et al, 2000a;Barki & Hartwick, 2001;Cramton, 2001;Montoya-Weiss et al, 2001). However, most of this research was empirically conducted after IT had been implemented in organisations surveyed; thus, it can be considered to be observations made on downstream results of the upstream resistance process.…”

Improving Software Development Process through Economic Mechanism Design

“…The roles typically include developers (designers and programmers), system analysts, testers, and customers or users. Predictably, interpersonal conflicts between these roles are unavoidable during the process [38,39]. Therefore, the participants of software development processes need to be identified by their private information, that is their goals, aims, preferences and skills (We will refer to those as "types" in this paper).…”