From Trade Unions to Digital Platforms: Reconfiguring Organizational Conflict Resolution in the Era of Digital Transformation, with Implications for Cameroon and Nigeria

Conflict is an inevitable feature of organisational life, and trade unions, reconciliation, mediation, and arbitration have long served as the primary means of resolving it in sub-Saharan African economies such as Cameroon and Nigeria. Objective: this seminar article investigates how digital transformation reshapes both the sources of organisational conflict and the mechanisms available for its resolution, extending the established analysis of collective mechanisms into the digital era and drawing out implications for business institutions in Cameroon and Nigeria. Methods: the study adopts a qualitative, systematic narrative literature-review design. An examination of 25 peer-reviewed articles, books, and policies published between 1968 and 2023 from the management, information systems and industrial relations fields reveals, through directed content analysis based on ten-codes covering five digitally caused sources of conflicts and five digital facilitators of resolution, that: digital conflict sources make up 40 percent of the coded corpus as opposed to 8 percent for digital resolution enablers; surveillance and algorithmic management emerge as the most common sub-theme (five out of twenty-five sources), whereas e-learning enabled training and issues of data ownership remain untouched. An institutional comparative assessment shows that Nigeria, with its codified Trade Disputes Act, provides a somewhat stronger ground for accommodating digital tools of dispute resolution than Cameroon, whose legal system is weak and fragile. Technology and conflict: dependent on leadership, digital competence and ethics.