Abstract:
Organizational Conflicts have been an attentive area for researchers in the field of management.
That has resulted in accumulating an extensive body of literature broadening the understanding
of Organizational Conflicts in managerial perspective. Researches are divided in their views on
the outcomes of organizational conflicts, while some of them argue that organizational conflicts
are dysfunctional to the organization, the rest claims that organizational conflicts bring positive
outcomes to some level. One of the aspects they have pointed out is that the outcome of the conflict
depends on the managers’ perception and the way of managing them.
This study examined the perception of managers on organizational conflicts and its outcomes in
the garment industry in Sri Lanka. A sample of 200 managers was selected as the sample of the
study from the garment sector. Two questioners namely “Perception of Organizational Conflict
Measure (POCM), and Conflict Outcome Measure (COM), developed and tested by the researches,
were administered among sample managers to collect data on perception of conflicts and their
outcomes. Hypotheses were formulated based on the conceptual model, developed through an
extensive literature review. The test of multivariate correlation was used to test the hypothesis of
the study.
It was revealed that negative perception of organizational conflicts by managers, correlates
significantly with negative out comes (r= -0.623, p= 0.001) while positive perception of conflicts
bears positive outcomes in the garment industry (r= 0.523, p= 0.000). But no evidence was found
to claim any association between the perception of conflicts and the level of outcomes.
