Power Asymmetry, Negotiations and Conflict Management in Organizations

Relationships are seldom equal. In fact, social interactions involve most of the times power asymmetric relationships. Especially in organizations people are daily faced with situations where they are either in a powerful or in a powerless position compared to others. Power stems from various sources and takes several forms. For instance, people are powerful when they can administer punishments or rewards, when they are in a hierarchically higher position than others, when they have knowledge and expertise, when they are admired and respected, and when they have alternative options which enable them to make choices. Importantly, power determines the way people interact with each other and subsequently, the way they engage in conflicts and conflict resolution. Power-holders are best able to asymmetrically enforce their will and therefore, they have the capability to determine the process and the outcome of a conflict. In this chapter, I present the major sources of power and the main differences between them. Consequently, I elaborate on the impact of power on conflict management based on the negotiation literature. I conclude by touching on the necessity to distinguish between two contradictory faces of power: power as opportunity and power as responsibility.

Phenotyping and SSR markers as a tool for identification of duplicates in lettuce germplasm

In total, 117 individual samples from 39 accessions of Lactuca sativa were selected from the Czech national collection of lettuce with the aim to quantify and compare patterns of genetic and phenotypic variability within and among lettuce accessions and to propose a rapid, reliable and inexpensive method for verification of possible duplicates. We focused on phenotypic evaluation and SSR genotyping, and studied their ability to distinguish between individual accessions. Phenotypic data revealed that no two accessions shared the exactly same phenotype and no accession exhibited variability in the characters studied. Variability in SSR markers was very low as ten of twenty scorable SSR loci exhibited no variation and the remaining ten provided 48 alleles in total. Although neither phenotypic nor SSR data alone can serve as evidence for unambiguous duplicate confirmation, their combination increases the resolution power of the method considerably. The obtained data on cultivated lettuce indicate weak, but significant correlation (R² = 0.34, P = 0.01) between the two data sets.