Manifestations of Conflict - Overt, Covert, and Everything Between

Conflict in employment relations rarely announces itself with placards and megaphones, yet the more visible forms — strikes, work-to-rule campaigns, overtime bans, and collective grievances — remain the starting point for this video's analysis. Set within 7HR01 Strategic Employment Relations and addressing Assessment Criterion 1.2, the video examines how cooperation and conflict coexist and compete across different organisational contexts. It draws on UK strike data and the long-run decline in industrial action since the 1970s to interrogate what headline measures of conflict actually tell — and fail to tell — practitioners about the state of employment relations in their organisations.

A substantial portion of the video concerns covert and individual expressions of conflict, covering absence patterns, labour turnover, and the withdrawal of discretionary effort as manifestations that sit beneath the threshold of formal dispute. The video considers how changes in union density, employment law, economic conditions, and industrial structure shape which forms of conflict predominate in a given workplace, connecting directly to the indicative content around indeterminacy and the contested nature of work. Sabotage, selective compliance, deliberate resistance to change, and foot-dragging are also brought into scope as behaviours that sustain plausible deniability while expressing underlying antagonism.

The video closes its analysis by contrasting the cumulative organisational costs of covert conflict — disengagement, turnover, and suppressed effort — against those associated with overt collective action, challenging the assumption that an absence of strikes signals healthy employment relations. Throughout, the contrast between cooperative and conflictual behaviour is situated in the reality that both tendencies operate simultaneously within workplaces, and that the balance between them varies considerably depending on sector, workforce composition, management practice, and the effectiveness of employee voice mechanisms.