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Organizational conflict management has tended to emphasize the effects of another party's behavior and of background conditions upon an individual's conflict behavior, implicitly treating conflict parties mechanistically as interchangeable responders to conflict stimuli. In contrast, this paper highlights individual differences as significant factors in conflict management. Drawing upon the more humanistic and clinical psychological literatures, the present paper develops a conceptual framework of the process through which an individual conceptualizes conflict and the impact of personal/developmental variables upon conceptualization. The model was developed using methods of grounded theory generation. Stages in the conceptualization process were found to be: experience symbolization, causal attribution, intentional attribution, context analysis, content analysis, and choice assessment. Individual differences act as perceptual screens and can trigger distortional defenses at each stage in the processing of a conflict stimulus. The model offers a method of analyzing the effect of individual differences during conflict. Implications for intervention strategies and training of third parties are examined, and future research directions are suggested.

In this paper, we propose that the locus of organizational boundary activities has migrated from the organization to the work unit level as enterprises reengineer structures, increase the use of cross-functional teams, cut organizational slack and adopt advanced information technologies. From an open systems perspective, we examine how environmental and organizational forces affect this migration process. Three types of boundary activity relevant for work units are identified: buffering, spanning, and bringing up boundaries. A set of preliminary propositions regarding relationships between environmental and organizational changes and boundary activities is offered as a guide for future research.

The phrase "switching cognitive gears" is used to call attention to the fact that cognitive functioning involves the capacity to shift between cognitive modes, from automatic processing to conscious engagement and back again. Effectiveness may be as much a function of an actor's capacity to sense when a switch is appropriate, as to process in one or another mode. In this paper the authors develop a perspective on the switch from automatic to active thinking and the conditions that provoke it. They apply the perspective to work settings and identify types of situations in which actors are expected to switch from habits of mind to active thinking. They propose further work to develop a framework for understanding the switch from active thinking to automatic.

This paper reports a case study that analyzes changes in organizational boundary activities carried out in a bank during and after restructuring from a functional to a team-based structure. Results suggest that the need for spanning, buffering, and bringing up boundaries does not disappear as organizations become `boundaryless'. Rather, boundary activities increase in significance and migrate to lower organizational levels. Several propositions are generated for future research.