We need to look at conflict as an opportunity, being aware that a good amount of the time, conflict brings bad things, and sometimes really ugly things. The trick for organizations, and people is to do everything possible to prevent ugly conflict from occurring and to prevent small conflict from escalating in major, long term war in the workplace. We can live with some conflict. What we can't live with is conflict that is trivial, destructive, personal and wastes time. In order to prevent destructive conflict, and to deal with it effectively we need to understand something about what conflict is about.
Conflict can occur for many reasons.
It occurs when people have legitimate differences of opinion on a subject, and care about the issue at hand. This kind of conflict is almost always destructive to an organization, since without a clear cause, it cannot be resolved. As time goes on the behaviour of the combatants gets worse with other non-combatants drawn into the fray. After a point, the damage is so bad that it can't be fixed without moving someone, or isolating the combatants somehow, although even that doesn't always eliminate the closed door backbiting and gossip that comes with this ugly territory. We are going to focus primarily on preventing this kind of unnecessary conflict, because it is the source of most organizational grief.