Abstract: At present, with the establishment of more green and intelligent communities, community governance becomes an important part of social governance. However, as different regions vary significantly in level of development, culture, resources and so on, different communities are plagued, to various degrees, with conflicts and frictions among interactive roles such as owners’ committees, property management companies, residential committees and residents. From the perspective of role theory, these predicaments include the inaction of the original owners’ committee and the difficulty in re-electing the new committee members, unsatisfactory attitude and poor services of the property management company and increasing complaints from the community residents in the case of the L Community of L City. The root causes can be explained in the following aspects: consensus could not be reached because roles from different entities stuck to their own stance and disagreed with each other; the role played by the residents’ committee was marginalized; the communication mechanism, with its original functions diminishing, turned out to be a platform for residents to express their anger. To sum up, since subjects of each party in the L Community failed to perform corresponding behaviors and responsibilities in accordance with due rules, conflicts arose as the gap between the expected higher quality and the reality widened, causing uncertainties to the building of a harmonious community. Therefore, it is imperative in community governance to strengthen role defining and identification of each subject, take actions in strict accordance with the role norms, and enhance role identity among different subjects.

Key words: role conflict, urban community, community governance, governance predicaments, owners’ committee