The paradox in partnership: The role of conflict in partnership building

The purpose of the book is to elucidate the paradoxical nature of partnerships. These alliances on one hand are designed to promote collaboration between individuals, groups and organizations, but on the other hand, the processes of their formation and maintenance entail continuous engagement with power struggles and conflict. Partnerships draw their dialectic nature from the complexity ingrained in group dynamics - the interrelations between two focal processes - conflict and cooperation - as maintained by prominent social psychologists and scholars in organization behavior such as Kurt Lewin, Muzafer Sherif, Morton Deutsch and Mary Parker Follett. These processes are often contradictory, albeit at times balancing and potentially contributing to positive group outcomes. This monogram examines the intricacies of conflict- cooperation "dance" in the context of interorganizational partnerships.