Conflict Management for Government and Businesses to Share Effective Practices in China
Alfred Wong, Lingnan University, Lu Wei, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Dean Tjosvold, Lingnan University, published “Conflict Management for Government and Businesses to Share Effective Practices in China” in OnlineFirst of Group & Organization Management. Dr. Wong kindly provided the following responses to the article.
Who is the target audience for this article?
Researchers, managers and government officials who are interested in understanding how government and business can work together effectively.
What inspired you to be interested in this topic?
Collaboration between government units and businesses is becoming more important nowadays. However, governments and businesses have many conflicts about such central issues as developing and implementing laws and regulations as they pursue their diverse agendas. Therefore, we are interested to know whether the constructive management of conflict contributes significantly to developing effective collaborative relationship between governments and businesses.
Were there findings that were surprising to you?
One surprising finding was that conflict is not necessarily damaging to the relationships between partner organizations. If conflict is managed cooperatively, it will lead to effective partnering relationships.
How do you see this study influencing future research and/or practice?
This study will encourage more future research on the development of trust between organizations and how cooperative conflict management can help achieve partnership effectiveness. Future research can also replicate the study in countries other than China.
How does this study fit into your body of work/line of research?
This study fits into my research area of conflict management. It supports the usefulness of cooperative conflict management in developing integrative exchanges and effective relationships between organizations.
How did your paper change during the review process?
The editor and two reviewers provided very constructive and helpful comments on the paper. We believe that we have successfully made use of their comments to improve the quality of the paper. We had made more analyses to support our arguments and had refined our model during the review process.
