From the author: The article was published in the magazine "Your Business", No. 1/2012 (February), pp. 50-55 For a manager at any level, the ability to effectively resolve and preventing production and labor conflicts is a professional competence, and in leading companies the ability to build a constructive conflict even appears among corporate values. Indeed, knowing the signs of a conflict situation, the patterns of development of conflicts, identifying the motives and goals of the parties to the conflict, realizing their true interests in a particular situation, mastering the methods of analyzing a conflict situation and organizing a joint search for solutions, a manager copes with complex management problems much more effectively. For many, conflict in an organization is associated with a breakdown in relationships, loss of psychological balance, and emotional imbalance. However, conflict can be beneficial both to the conflicting parties and to the company. The task is to ensure that the conflict from the business context does not shift into the area of ​​personal relationships, does not turn into mutual discredit, and does not destroy the compatibility that has been formed over the years. An example of a “useful” conflict for a company is the so-called positional conflict, when opposing, competing goals are deliberately formed in the structure of the organization for departments, resulting in an objective confrontation. Positional conflict makes it possible for management to more objectively evaluate the actions of units, since in the confrontation they are looking for more advanced arguments for their viability and developing new technologies. In other words, positional conflict creates constructive tension that is beneficial to the organization. Therefore, in practice, it is often specifically provided for in the target structure of the organization. The pathology of positional conflicts arises when the target tension caused by purely positional reasons is saturated with emotions, turns into interpersonal tension and interpersonal conflict. In addition, the complete absence of conflicts in an organization looks unnatural, harmony in management always smacks of falsehood, as the founder of modern conflictology put it Georg Simmel, “Hostility, along with sympathy, is the basis of human relations.” Obviously, this is why two well-known leaders in the United States - J. Burke from Johnson & Johnson Corporation and E. Grown from Inep - insist on the importance of such a factor as “creative confrontation” in managing organizations. They not only encourage divergent views among managers, they simply require them to do so. They surround themselves with people who are prepared enough to know the truth and independent enough in their judgment to express them openly, especially in cases where the truth does not coincide with the views of senior leaders. Of course, organizational conflicts need to be managed, and what is important here is not so much the forms of action as their functional or dysfunctional consequences. The dysfunctional consequences of the conflict are as follows: in the process of destructive conflict interaction, the participants’ attention inevitably switches from activities to clarifying interpersonal relationships; conflict disorganizes the thinking of participants and destroys existing systems of relationships; conflict contributes to the destruction of the system of interpersonal relationships that have developed between the subjects of interaction before it began; the conflict forms a negative image of the other - the “image of the enemy”, which contributes to the formation of a negative attitude towards the opponent; conflict reinforces violent ways of solving problems in an individual’s social experience; conflict destroys the team and the individual; conflict reduces efficiency and productivity; the conflict involves new participants; conflict increases costs; conflictintensifies negative relationships between people; conflict produces new conflicts; the assessment of the team in the external environment decreases (the image of the team decreases). The functional consequences mean the following: conflict contributes to the development of mutual understanding between the participants in the interaction; conflict allows for a deeper assessment of the individual psychological characteristics of the participants; conflict allows you to ease psychological tension, which is the reaction of participants to a conflict situation, relieves emotional tension, and leads to a subsequent decrease in the intensity of negative emotions; conflict serves as a source of personality development, interpersonal relationships, and provides social experience in solving difficult situations; when defending just goals in a conflict, the opponent increases his authority among others; conflict serves as a means of diagnosing the state of affairs in the organization and stimulates the development of the company; conflict objectifies contradictions, reveals shortcomings, and allows for targeted corrective action; conflict allows you to adapt to new circumstances; conflict can be a means of testing and self-affirmation of the individual. Thus, managerial action in many variations is not only acceptable, but also must be perceived as conflicting. It is conflict situations that can be points of growth and development of an organization and can give a significant impetus to the formation of new relationships in it. However, to realize this important function of conflicts, two essential conditions are required: firstly, a change in attitude towards conflicts, the formation of a positive attitude towards them and the ability to “see” a constructive principle in conflicts; secondly, developing the ability to analyze conflict situations, manage them, enrich the “repertoire” of conflict resolution technologies, as well as adherence to the principles that contribute to conflict resolution. Principles of conflict resolution: 1. Institutionalization of the conflict (establishment of norms and procedures for resolving or resolving the conflict): limiting the number of participants and areas of manifestation of the conflict; acceptance by all parties of certain rules for conflict resolution - organizational and (or) ethical standards, clear agreements, etc.; control by third parties (government bodies, arbitrators, etc.). 2. Legitimation of the conflict resolution procedure: recognition by all parties of the legality and fairness of a certain procedure for resolving a dispute, even if the established procedures diverge from some (outdated) legal norms; recording procedures in special documents and making them widely known to all parties to the conflict. 3. Structuring conflicting groups: determining the composition of participants in the conflict, representatives (leaders) of rival groups, various centers of group influence and their strength. 4. Separating people from the problem: demonstrating a willingness to deal with the problem; hardness towards problems and gentleness towards people. 5. Offering mutually beneficial options; developing a wide range of options; search for mutual benefit; finding out the preferences of the other party. 6. Attention to interests, not positions, fixation of basic interests; search for common interests; recognition of the opponent's interests as part of the problem. 7. Use of objective criteria: development of objective criteria for each part of the problem; using fair criteria; using multiple criteria. 8. Conflict reduction: consistent weakening of the conflict by transferring it to a softer level of confrontation or confrontation. Conflict resolution is a complex multi-stage process, which, based on the diagnosis of conflicts, is expressed in the prevention, containment, and regulation of conflicts. Conflict Management.