Diagnosing conflict determinants in project management

Project managers frequently feel deficient in two particular areas. First, they often encounter difficulty in forecasting actions which may lead to unproductive conflicts and disagreements with those who support them. Second, once a conflict has developed, they often have difficulty in finding an appropriate method to satisfactorily resolve the disagreement. This research reports an exploratory study which focused on delineating a number of propositions on specific determinants of project management conflict in high-technology organizations. The sources of conflict uncovered were then empirically tested by polling the expert opinions of 100 project managers in a wide variety of task-oriented situations.