242 Strategic Leadership
because people, with their contending values, interests, personalities, and points
of view, are everywhere. As long as resources are limited and humans are finite,
conflict will be at the center of human experience.
All these aspects of conflict shed light on the qualities, skills, and knowledge
that individuals who carry leadership responsibilities should possess in order
to deal with it. Dialogue, negotiation, and methods of conflict resolution are a
leader’s indispensable tools. Yet it has become clear in this study that no mat-
ter how successful a leader might be in resolving political, policy, and personal-
ity clashes, there are deeper structural conflicts in the governance of academic
institutions that resist easy reconciliation. Structural conflict does not necessarily
require antipathy between the parties but is a tension in the values to which the
organization is committed. It appears both in contrasting orientations as to what
should count in making choices and in the tensions enmeshed in the way those
choices are made. Conflicts in basic values and paradigms cannot be reconciled by
a leader’s political skills and administrative talents alone but require the resources
of strategic thinking and leadership.
Reconciling Conflicts in Values and Paradigms
We can examine some aspects of the dynamic of reconciling opposing values in
a recent study of international business leadership. Although the authors we dis-
cuss use a different terminology than ours, their work gives a number of examples
of the methods of strategic leadership in resolving conflicts between different
cultural paradigms and contrasting organizational values.
Fons Trompenaars and Charles Hampden-Turner (2002) explore contrasting
cultural value systems, including the classic conflict between cultures that define
achievement in individualistic as opposed to communitarian terms. Western
countries, especially the United States, emphasize achievement by the individual,
while most Asian cultures put primary stress on group accomplishments. In deal-
ing with a culturally diverse workforce, creative managers know that cultural
value systems and paradigms run too deep to be drastically changed, since they
involve a whole pattern of seeing and understanding the world from the ground
up. Rather than confounding workers by imposing an incentive plan from another
culture, effective managers try to reconcile differences between value systems. For
example, they might try to develop a reward system that measures and recognizes
individual achievement in terms of what it contributes to a team. The interac-
tions of the team, in turn, can be designed to provide opportunities for individual
growth and creativity. The energy and motivation of the group is then stimulated
by new forms of recognition of their achievements as a team, perhaps in competi-
tion with other teams (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner 2002).
Vicious Circles and Virtuous Circles
Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner analyze a series of conflicts in cultural and
organizational values and their resolution in terms of what they call “vicious