conflict ad dispute1.doc

Discuss the contention that conflict and dispute are inevitable on commercial projects. Introduction: Over the past decades, commercial project activities have developed rapidly. Project management exists to achieve a specific goal of the project within limited cost, resource and time. Managers and other personnel of the project, however, may experience pressure, restriction and emotional resistance due to changing environment, which may lead to dispute and conflict. Alliance parties of the project may feel unfair because of the disproportion of benefits, which may also result in dispute and conflict. Consequently disputes and conflicts are very common and easy to constitute on commercial projects. Conceptual difference between conflict and dispute: On commercial projects, the terms conflict and dispute are treated totally the same by some people and they think one can replace another. These people as a result never recognize the difference between them, which may largely affect the way they solve disputable problems. Moore(1989) mixes there two terms in his books. Many scholars hold the view that conflict and dispute are different and they should not be blurred in conceptual context although there are no exactly precise and generally accepted definition of dispute and conflict. In the middle of 20th century, scholars defined conflict by using a large range of different phenomena. Pondy (1967) arranges those definitions into three categories: previous conditions, emotions, behaviors and perceptions. Thomas(2012) defines conflict as a process which arises when one party get to know that another party has frustrated some aspects of his. In general, there are two ways to define conflict. One is that Schmidt and Kochan (1972) pay attention to phenomenon which is related to competitive intention, such as deliberately interfering another partys aims and this is much more closer to the widely used term of conflict and is especially popular in industrial projects. The