Managing Conflicts within Organizational Culture in Local Public Structures

This paper proposal is focusing on an interdisciplinary subject, correlating the field of social conflicts within the complexity of organizational culture inside the organizational space of local public agencies, considering their vision, structure and formalism. The main objective of the research is to find out if organizations’ size as the number of the employees, on one hand and different types and dimensions of organizational culture, on the other have the capacity of influencing intra-organizational conflicts between the members of public local organizations. Social conflict will be analyzed from a holistic point of view, starting with its sources, types of manifestation and continuing with third-party intervention and conflict solving styles and methods. A short presentation of a theoretical background of conflicts, organization theory and behavior, but also of organizational culture will prepare the empirical analysis that will contain two different dimensions’ analyses centered around a number of two hypotheses, containing two elements of any organization: its size, as a rational, visible element and the organizational culture, a rather complex, hidden and difficult to quantify irrational element. The analysis of the organizational culture concept will follow the model of the 6 dimensions of organizational culture proposed by the study of a group of researchers conducted by Geert Hofstede on 20 organizations in Holland and Denmark, about 20 years ago. The quantitative survey analysis reunites a number of more than 150 members of three local public organizations from the city of Cluj-Napoca, Romania.