Towards a Multi-level Model of Conflict to Sensitise practitioners to the Socio-organisational Complexity of an IT Systems Development Project

Practitioners are typically aware that organisational complexity is important to IT project performance however they are unsure of exactly what it comprises and how they should take it into account in their decision-making. This paper contributes to addressing the ‘what’ question by taking a multi-level conflict approach to understanding the relationship between individuals, groups and IT project complexity an area in the literature so far unexplored and thus the basis of this literature survey and theory development. We first assess existing studies of conflict using semantic analysis to identify the basic components of conflict. We consequently examine the relationship between these components. Lastly we formulate a multilevel model of the phenomena to relate conflict to IT Systems Development Project (ISDP) complexity. The resulting model of conflict in ISDPs suggests that conflicts can occur at three different the levels: individual; intra-group; and inter-group. And that the following can be the objects of conflict: tasks, processes, relationships, roles, time, resources, capabilities, values, status, distributive justice, procedural justice. This approach is interesting as the types of characteristics identified by using insights from applied psychology and management are at a granularity that enables practitioners to get a handle on aspects of socioorganisational complexity and thus opens up action research as an approach to studying ISDP complexity.