Beyond third party role: Disputes and managerial intervention

This article reviews the research findings on managerial third party intervention and the factors that affect role choice. It explores the implications of research findings and advocates using a political approach to investigate the ways that managers enter into disputes, both directly and indirectly, and through such roles as conflict orchestrators. It calls for reexamining the assumptions that underlie this research and for focusing on the process of defining conflicts, uncovering coalitions and networks of relationships, and linking third party intervention to the ideology that underlies organizational disputes.