Conflict management and resolution in Irish Workplaces: an investigation of which approaches have demonstrated more benefits to employers and employees

Abstract

This research was inspired by all the learning on the vast topic of conflict resolution from all disciplines during this Master’s degree in conjunction with my personal experience of two decades working in the field of human resources and people management. Workplace conflict, specifically, has been studied by organisational and people management literature with a focus in conflict resolution practices, especially in regards of the alternative dispute resolutions, a practice that has been crescent in Ireland, especially after the publication of the Workplace Relations Act in 2015. Since the publication, some studies have been carried out to investigate innovations in workplace disputes, however, little information exists of how organisations have managed conflicts, and which would be the most effective approach capable of bringing benefits and affect positively the relationship between employers and employees. In this research, there is a particular interest to shed a light into the aspects of management of conflicts in a day-to-day basis in organisations in Ireland. The objective of this research is to initiate an examination of how effective the approaches to management and resolution of conflicts in organisations operating in Ireland are and how beneficial it is to both employees and employers, besides this research seeks to provide information for professionals, organisations and other interested people and to inspire others to do further research in the topic. As the topic is broad, this research will seek to focus on the conflict management strategies in use by employers at the Irish job market to the degree that the available data permits, once that employment disputes are private information and under confidentiality terms to be disclosed by employers. In order to offer a full overview of the scenario in Ireland, this paper draws on all available source of information regardless of a timeline length, applying the research methodology based on the onion research model by Saunders et al. (2019) to support the data collection made via online questionnaire distributed to employees of organisations operating in Ireland. Through this online survey, this research findings were analysed in relation to the objectives and hypothesis proposed to this study and able to answer this research question.