“Conflict may be personal, interpersonal, or between rival groups or coalitions. It may be built into organizational structures, roles, attitudes, and stereotypes or arise over a scarcity of resources. It may be explicit or covert. Whatever the reason, and whatever the form it takes, its source rests in some perceived or real divergence of interests.”

—  Gareth Morgan , book Images of Organization

Source: Images of Organization (1986), p. 155 as cited in: As cited in: R. van den Nieuwenhof (2003) 2 strategie: omgaan met de omgeving. p. 43-44

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Conflict may be personal, interpersonal, or between rival groups or coalitions. It may be built into organizational str…" by Gareth Morgan?
Gareth Morgan photo
Gareth Morgan 24
Organizational theorist 1943

Related quotes

Rollo May photo

“Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 35
Context: Whatever sphere we may be in, there is a profound joy in the realization that we are helping to form the structure of the new world. This is creative courage, however minor or fortuitous our creations may be. We can then say, with Joyce, Welcome, O life! We go for the millionth time to forge in the smithy of our souls the uncreated conscience of the race.

“Whatever forms your resentments may take, they wreck only you, not the one you resent.”

Guy Finley (1949) American self-help writer, philosopher, and spiritual teacher, and former professional songwriter and musician

Designing Your Own Destiny

“Organizational forms — specific configurations of goals, boundaries, and activities — are the elements selected by environmental criteria, and change may occur either through new forms eliminating old ones or through the modification of existing forms. Environmental niches are distinct in combination of resources and other constraints that are sufficient to support organizational form. Organizational forms, then, are organized activity systems oriented toward exploiting the resources within a niche.
Selection pressures may favour or eliminate entire groups of organizations, such as industries, and the changing population distribution of organizations in a society reflects the operation of such selection pressures.”

Howard E. Aldrich (1943) American sociologist

Source: Organizations and Environments, 1979, p. 28

Julien Offray de La Mettrie photo

“Whatever the virtue may be, from whatever source it may come, it is worthy of esteem… Mind, beauty, wealth, nobility, although the children of chance, all have their own value, as skill, learning and virtue have theirs.”

Julien Offray de La Mettrie book Man a Machine

p, 125
Man a Machine (1747)

Charles Lyell photo

“The new race or species may not be absolutely superior in the sum of its powers and endowment to the parent stock, and may even be more simple in structure and of a lower grade of intelligence, as well as of organisation, provided, on the whole, it happens to have some slight advantage over its rivals. Progression, therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 411-412
Context: The competition of races and species, observes Mr. Darwin, is always most severe between those which are most closely allied and which fill nearly the same place in the economy of nature. Hence, when the conditions of existence are modified, the original stock runs great risk of being superseded by some one of its modified offshoots. The new race or species may not be absolutely superior in the sum of its powers and endowment to the parent stock, and may even be more simple in structure and of a lower grade of intelligence, as well as of organisation, provided, on the whole, it happens to have some slight advantage over its rivals. Progression, therefore, is not a necessary accompaniment of variation and natural selection, though, when a higher organisation happens to be coincident with superior fitness to new conditions, the new species will have greater power and a greater chance of permanently maintaining and extending its ground.

“In the midst of normal activity, whatever it may be, there is a distant Signal, almost like heraldic trumpets. Everyone takes the Signal calmly, and with it, everyone stops speaking or whatever he may be doing. It is the Signal that He (or They) is coming through His Kingdom. There is no awestruck prostration or falling down on one's knees. Rather, the attitude is most matter-of-fact It is an occurrence to which all are accustomed and to comply takes absolute precedence over everything. There are no exceptions.”

Robert Monroe (1915–1995) American founder of The Monroe Institute

Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Chapter 8. Because the Bible Tells Me So

Stefan Zweig photo

“Whatever a woman's reason may say, her feelings tell her the truth.”

Stefan Zweig book Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman

Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman (1927)

“The purpose of formulating [a] conflict as a game is not that of resolving the conflict by 'solving the game.' It is that of displaying the structure of the conflict and thereby exposing features of it that may be concealed by rhetoric. In particular, appreciation of the peculiar structure of some of the so-called mixed—motive conflicts represented nonzero-sum games may change the conflicting parties' perception of their situation.”

Anatol Rapoport (1911–2007) Russian-born American mathematical psychologist

Anatol Rapoport, Conflict in man-made environment. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974; As cited in M.J. Apter, ‎J.H. Kerr, ‎S. Murgatroyd (1993) Advances in Reversal Theory. p. 63-64
1970s and later

Bertrand Russell photo

“The world at present is obsessed by the conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other. I do not think that the fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think the ideologies are merely a way of grouping people, and that the passions involved are merely those which always arise between rival groups. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)

Susanna Wesley photo

“Whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, takes off your relish for spiritual things, whatever increases the authority of the body over the mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may seem in itself.”

Susanna Wesley (1669–1742) Mother of Methodism

Letter to John Wesley, June 8, 1725

Related topics