Workplace Dispute Resolution and the Management of Individual Conflict —A Thematic Analysis of Five Case Studies

This Acas funded report explores the management of individual conflict and the resolution of employment disputes in five organisations drawing on over one hundred hours of interview data gathered from discussions with HR practitioners, line and operational managers, employee representatives, and trained mediators. In light of increased concern over the impact of employment disputes on public expenditure, economic performance and employee well-being, substantial policy attention has been paid to the ways in which organisations respond to workplace conflict. In particular, there has been an increased focus on the potential for earlier intervention in order to resolve conflict through the use of alternative approaches such as mediation. Surprisingly, there has been relatively little contemporary academic research into these important issues. Therefore, this thematic review aims to provide new insights into the challenges faced by organisations in managing conflict

An Uncertain Destination: On the Development of Conflict Management Systems in U.S. Corporations

[Excerpt] Our survey and field research have led us to some tentative conclusions that do not conform to the conventional wisdom of our field. From its inception, ADR has been controversial. On the one hand, ADR has been embraced by a coterie of champions who have always believed that its advantages over litigation were so obvious and compelling it would only be a matter of time before ADR was adopted universally. These champions have also been missionaries, proselytizing their faith in all quarters and making numerous converts. Like all true believers, ADR champions cannot understand why others have not yet gotten the faith. On the other hand, there has always been a group of ADR opponents who believe ADR undercuts our system of justice and must be resisted. ADR champions believe in the inevitability of ADR, while ADR opponents believe the movement to ADR can be stopped and even reversed. On balance, we believe in ADR\u27s merits and share many of its champions\u27 convictions. Our research — which is based on the analytical model we present in this paper — suggests, however, that there is nothing inevitable about the ultimate triumph of ADR

A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Tales of the unexpected: Perceptions of excellence in Facilities Services

ISS UK Ltd commissioned the Centre for FM Development [CFMD] at Sheffield Business School to investigate clients' perceptions of service excellence in FM. We could not locate previous studies of service excellence, as opposed to service quality in Business to Business as opposed to Business to Consumer literature. In the latter excellence is variously regarded as synonymous with expense and as being easy to do business with, even in budget environments. Our interviews confirmed those two views. Some clients perceive excellence as too high a standard to aim for - or to be seen by senior management to aim for, - except on particular customer or business critical journeys. Internal users of FM services tended to view excellence as having their problems solved within a known timescale. Other organisations have embraced pursuit of facilities excellence as part of an organisation wide strategy. They describe having been on or being on a journey beyond the limitations of SLA driven contracts. Financial evaluation of the two models was beyond the scope of the project but there is some evidence that the overall excellence model is actually more cost effective

ADR-based Workplace Conflict Management Systems: A Case of American Exceptionalism

[Excerpt] The diffusion of ADR-based conflict management systems is a development increasingly highlighted in the literature. Organizations are seen as putting in place multiple procedures and practices so that different varieties of workplace conflict can be effectively addressed. Just why organizations are electing to introduce these integrated bundles of innovative conflict management practices is a matter of debate, but many view the development as transforming the manner in which workplace problems are managed in modern organizations, with some even pronouncing that it amounts to the rewriting of the social contract at work (Lipsky and Seeber 2006). This paper argues that to the extent to which conflict management systems are being diffused, it is occurring mainly in the USA became the institutional context for the management of the employment relationship creates considerable incentives for the adoption of ADR-inspired conflict management innovations. Other Anglo-American countries, where it might be thought reasonable to expect a similar pattern of ADR innovation at the workplace to emerge, are not experiencing any discernible shift towards conflict management systems inside organizations. It is suggested that in the absence of institutional incentives to adopt workplace management systems, organizations are unlikely to opt for radical conflict management innovations. At the same time, drawing on research in the Irish context, it is argued that tried-and-tested conflict management practices do change over time, with an incremental and evolutionary approach adopted by some organizations to upgrade practices considered the most interesting development. The paper is organized as follows. The first section assesses why the emergence of integrated conflict management systems in organizations is considered to be a significant new development in the USA. The next section evaluates evidence and suggests that a similar pattern of workplace conflict management innovation is not occurring in other Anglo-American countries. After this evaluation, it is suggested that the institutional context in the USA creates uniquely strong incentives for organizations to adopt integrated bundles of ADR practices at the workplace - causing the emergence of conflict management systems to be a case of ‘American exceptionalism’. The following section argues that in the absence of strong institutional incentives to do so, organizations are unlikely to move radically away from established conflict management systems. The penultimate section explains that even in the presence of organizational inertia, conflict management practices seldom stay the same and uses research in the Irish context to suggest that organizations sometimes use an evolutionary approach to upgrade conflict management practices in an incremental yet continuous manner. The final section presents a number of case studies of this evolutionary approach to conflict management innovation. The conclusions bring together the arguments of the paper

A framework for smart production-logistics systems based on CPS and industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has received increasing attention from both academia and industry. However, several challenges including excessively long waiting time and a serious waste of energy still exist in the IIoT-based integration between production and logistics in job shops. To address these challenges, a framework depicting the mechanism and methodology of smart production-logistics systems is proposed to implement intelligent modeling of key manufacturing resources and investigate self-organizing configuration mechanisms. A data-driven model based on analytical target cascading is developed to implement the self-organizing configuration. A case study based on a Chinese engine manufacturer is presented to validate the feasibility and evaluate the performance of the proposed framework and the developed method. The results show that the manufacturing time and the energy consumption are reduced and the computing time is reasonable. This paper potentially enables manufacturers to deploy IIoT-based applications and improve the efficiency of production-logistics systems

Towards a Systematic Repository of Knowledge About Managing Collaborative Design Conflicts

Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. A key factor in the effectiveness of these processes concerns how well conflicts are managed. Better approaches need to be developed and adopted, but the lack of systematization and dissemination of the knowledge in this field has been a big barrier to the cumulativeness of research in this area as well as to incorporating these ideas into design practice. This paper describes a growing repository of conflict management expertise, built as an augmentation of the MIT Process Handbook, that is designed to address these challenges.

On-line planning and scheduling: an application to controlling modular printers

We present a case study of artificial intelligence techniques applied to the control of production printing equipment. Like many other real-world applications, this complex domain requires high-speed autonomous decision-making and robust continual operation. To our knowledge, this work represents the first successful industrial application of embedded domain-independent temporal planning. Our system handles execution failures and multi-objective preferences. At its heart is an on-line algorithm that combines techniques from state-space planning and partial-order scheduling. We suggest that this general architecture may prove useful in other applications as more intelligent systems operate in continual, on-line settings. Our system has been used to drive several commercial prototypes and has enabled a new product architecture for our industrial partner. When compared with state-of-the-art off-line planners, our system is hundreds of times faster and often finds better plans. Our experience demonstrates that domain-independent AI planning based on heuristic search can flexibly handle time, resources, replanning, and multiple objectives in a high-speed practical application without requiring hand-coded control knowledge

Instrumenting self-modifying code

Adding small code snippets at key points to existing code fragments is called instrumentation. It is an established technique to debug certain otherwise hard to solve faults, such as memory management issues and data races. Dynamic instrumentation can already be used to analyse code which is loaded or even generated at run time.With the advent of environments such as the Java Virtual Machine with optimizing Just-In-Time compilers, a new obstacle arises: self-modifying code. In order to instrument this kind of code correctly, one must be able to detect modifications and adapt the instrumentation code accordingly, preferably without incurring a high penalty speedwise. In this paper we propose an innovative technique that uses the hardware page protection mechanism of modern processors to detect such modifications. We also show how an instrumentor can adapt the instrumented version depending on the kind of modificiations as well as an experimental evaluation of said techniques.Comment: In M. Ronsse, K. De Bosschere (eds), proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Automated Debugging (AADEBUG 2003), September 2003, Ghent. cs.SE/030902