TITLE:
Atypical Inter-Volunteer Conflict Management
AUTHORS:
Djidjoho Isaac Houngue
KEYWORDS:
Volunteering, Expatriation, Conflict Management, Mediation, Class-Destroying, Africa
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Social Sciences,
Vol.12 No.10,
October
29,
2024
ABSTRACT: Volunteers are an important and useful group for the functioning of certain micro-social organizations such as parishes. But managing them is fraught with tension and internal conflict. The strategies adopted by leaders to manage these conflicts vary from one organization to another. This article looks at the strategies adopted by expatriate missionary priests to manage the multiple conflicts between volunteers engaged in parish service. We use the concepts of mediation and class-destroying as a theoretical basis, followed by an empirical base of semi-structured interviews with 40 priests and 80 volunteers to make some contribution to the managerial literature. The issue of conflict management between workers in an organization is an important and abundant one in the managerial literature. By contrast, the management of conflicts between volunteers in a parish seems to be relatively rare. The parish as a field of research also appears to be unexploited by researchers. The parish is an important base for managerial practices.