Managing Organizational Conflict from Islamic Perspective

1.0 Introduction

This assignment reviews a journal article written by Suhaili Sharif, Kamaruzaman Nordin and Ahmad Sufian Che Abdullah (2004) entitled “Managing Organizational Conflict from Islamic Perspective”, which was published in Jurnal Syariah, Volume 12.

This article seeks to analyze the concept of conflict in an organization and how it can be dealt with according to the Islamic Shariah.

In their abstract, Suhaili et al., (2004) explained that conflict is one process where two or more different parties clash in sense of their personal interest and objective. Conflict is something unavoidable in any organization thus the religion of Islam has outlined some methods on how to resolve conflicts in an organization’s environment.

Managing Organizational Conflict from Islamic Perspective was laid out by Suhaili et al., (2004 who pointed out in Jamilah Othman (1997) that the commonalities among most common conflict definitions includes concepts of opposition, scarcity and blockage and assumption where there are two or more parties whose interests or goals appear to be incompatible. Here, it is acknowledged that when resources are scarce, it encourages a party to block the goal of the other which causes a state of conflict.

In this article, there are three views of conventional Organizational Conflict Perspective summarized in Table 1 below.  

Table 1: Three Perspective of Organizational Conflict

View Description
Traditional View
(1930s -1940s) Stephen P.R (1994) told that conflict is a bad and negative connotation which must be avoided. It is consistent with attitudes on group behaviour. It is a result of poor communication by the managers to their employees. In this perspective, mere direct attention is given to the causes of conflict where they will only correct the malfunction to improve the group and organizational performance.
Human Relation View
(mid-1970s) Under the Human Relation's view, conflict is taken as a natural occurence....