Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the impact of organizational culture on the conflict handling style in non-profit organizations. Conflicts in non-profit organizations and especially in associations are more numerous, mainly because of the search for compromise in the decision-making phases and the high level of loyalty in mission that strongly stimulates the voice of one’s opinion. The authors observe that a modification of the organizational culture, through symbolic changes, can resolve the conflicts sequence. Design/methodology/approach – Culture is measured through the organizational culture profile tool and the culture deciphering technique. The authors detail two cases of non-profit organizations, in which conflicts sequence resolution was handled through organizational culture change while conflicts resolution at the individual level could not bring an end to the conflicts sequence. Findings – These cases highlight how organizational culture shapes behaviors and conflicts handling styles. These cases also give insights on how an organizational culture can be changed to setup new default conflict handling styles in an organization. The cultural change management only worked when it was planned on critical cultural change readiness factors with a strong enforcement of the change by the governing bodies. Research limitations/implications – This study complements research studies on how organizational culture shapes attitudes and behaviors and shows how and under which conditions a cultural change could resolve a conflict sequence. This study also presents a conflict resolution method when the roots of conflicts are embedded in the existing organizational culture. In such conflicts situation, interpersonal conflict resolution technique did not solve the conflicts sequence and only cultural change finally brought an end to the sequence. Practical implications – A combined search on two levels, the individual level and the organizational culture level, will thus show convergent conflict sources and get a great deal of knowledge before solving individual-level conflicts. Social implications – The non-profit sector is sometimes subject to high-conflict situation and this research contributes to more efficient conflict resolution protocols with an applicable method of conflict analysis, change management and conflict resolution. Originality/value – The work showed how the organizational culture is a key element in the explanation of conflict sources and conflict handling in case of high and repeated conflict situation. It is thus possible to resolve conflict sequence by changing a carefully chosen cultural trait. Nevertheless, the culture change management program is complex and risky. In a high-conflict situation, the authors identified several key conflict resolution factors: the careful identification of the organizational culture traits explaining conflict handling style; the alignment of the management team on the cultural change plan to raise up the intensity of the new set of behaviors; and the selection of the most efficient symbolic change decision.

This paper discusses conflict management in the nonprofit sector through organizational culture change. While most research on conflict management points to the importance of psychological factors and situational factors in conflict resolution (Rahim, 1983), fewer works have explored the link between conflict resolution and organizational factors (Lawless and Trif, 2016). Works on organizational factors focus mainly on the training of line managers in conflict resolution and support from the HR department (Roche and Teague, 2012). Our paper considers a new perspective and illustrates the link between organizational culture and conflict. In this study, we have designed a new conflict resolution mechanism based on corporate culture change. Interpersonal conflicts within organizations, either linked to the work organization or to daily tasks, have negative and costly impacts, such as absenteeism, deterioration of involvement at work (De Dreu and Weingart, 2003), in particular, in the context of complex task achievement (De Dreu et al., 2001). Researchers have proposed the deployment of conflict management systems (Rahim, 1983; van de Vliert et al., 1995) to achieve improvements in organizational efficiency and cost reduction (Ury et al., 1988; Lipsky et al., 2003; Le Flanchec and Rojot, 2009). Moreover, some authors have shown that conflicts in non profit organizations, and especially in associations, are more numerous, mainly because compromises are sought in the decisionmaking phases (Schwenk, 1990), the management style is informal (Hunter and Renwick, 2009; Saundry, Jones and Wibberley, 2015), there are opportunities to react when dialoguing with managers and directors as they are open to consensus (de Reuver, 2006), there is high level of loyalty in the workplace and the non profit’s mission strongly stimulates people to voice there opinion, in conflict situation instead of demonstrably backing down (Vigoda and Cohen, 2003; Hoffmann, 2006; Unal and Turgut, 2015).