Building Trust and Constructive Conflict Management in Organizations (eBook)

This book presents the most recent theoretical insights and practical intervention methods to (re)build trust between management and organized employees in organizations.  Offering a multidisciplinary perspective on trust and conflict management in organizations, the book draws from diverse fields such as organizational psychology, business, law, industrial relations and sociology. It examines the often encountered breaches of trust between management and organized workers, and the resulting destructive social conflicts, social actions, strikes or dramatic business decisions. Its focus is on trust and conflict management at the organizational level in an industrial relations context: that of employee representatives and management. The book introduces a new theoretical approach: the Tree of Trust, designed to analyse and mediate the interconnected levels of trust and distrust in industrial relations. It presents case studies and practical recommendations to build trust and constructive conflict management in the organizations, and illustrates these by means of experiences from different countries around the globe.

Patricia Elgoibar is Assistant Professor in negotiation at IESEG School of Management (France) and works in the coordination team of the project: New European industrial relations (NEIRE). Her scholarly interests are conflict management, labor relations, negotiation, gender equality and intercultural studies.

Together with Lourdes Munduate and Martin Euwema she is co-editor of the handbook 'Ten steps for empowering worker representatives in the new European industrial relations'. Madrid: McGraw Hill, 2012. She is currently Western Europe regional representative for the International Association for Conflict Management (IACM).

Martin C. Euwema is Full Professor in Organizational Psychology at KU Leuven. He is specialized in conflict management, organizational change and (international) leadership. He is chair of the research group Occupational and Organizational Psychology and Professional Learning, and co-director of the Leuven Center for Collaborative Management (LCM). He is past-president of the International Association for Conflict Management and visiting professor at Tsinghua University (Beijing), Ieseg Business School (Paris) and University of Kopenhagen (Denmark). He is (co)author of more than 120 publications and is an experienced consultant and mediator.