The Executive Way

What causes conflict among high-level American corporate executives? How do executives manage their conflicts? Based on interviews with over two hundred executives and their support personnel, Calvin Morrill seeks to answer these and other questions and also provide an intimate portrait of these men and women as they cope with problems usually hidden from those outside their exclusive ranks. Personal and corporate scandals, compensation battles, budget worries, interdepartmental rivalries, personal enmities, and general rancor are among the topis looked at. The author asserts that what most influences the way managers handle routine conflicts are the cultures created by their company's organizational structure: whether there is a strong hierarchy, a weak hierarchy, or an absence of any strong central authority. The issues most likely to cause conflict within corporations he identifies as managerial style, competition between departments, and performance evaluations, promotions, and compensation. Among the people whose day-to-day lives are studied are Jacobs, a divisional executive whose intuitive understanding of the corporate hierarchy enables him to topple his incompetent superior without direct confrontation; Fuller, who through a mix of brains, guile, and connections rises from staff executive secretary to corporate vice president in a large bank; Green, an old-fashioned accounting partner in a firm being taken over by management consultants; and the "Princess of Power," "Iron Man," and the "Terminator" - executives fighting their way to the top of a successful entertainment company. This portrayal of daily life and conflict management among corporate elites will be of interest to professionals, scholars, and practitioners in organizational culture and behaviour, managerial decision making, dispute, social control, law and society, and organizational ethnography.