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My personal reflection on conflict management
Conflict and team dynamics
Conclusion to conflict management
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Conflict management is the process of regulating and reducing the negative aspects of conflict while increasing the positive facts of disagreement. The management of conflict is essential to harvesting the potential benefits of disagreement. Unfortunately, unchecked conflict obstructs collaboration and productivity within a team or organization. Unbridled Conflict can dreadfully turn personal rapidly provoking the climate to turn hostile and stressful. At this juncture, the environment or workplace fosters frustration, anger, and less concerns about having the facts. Moreover, the lack of facts shifts the focus on personality rather than the issues. As stated in the article, “How to Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight”, constructive conflict …show more content…
Disagreement saturated in an environment which avoids interpersonal conflict encourages team members to challenge one another in a constructive way. As team members challenge ideas, it stimulates alternatives thus providing a rich range of options. The range of options cultivates a more complete collective understanding of the choices which leads to effective decision making. In addition, if the conflict is regulated to facts rather than people and personalities, the team can rigorously debate the critical issues in a material way while avoiding useless fact-less based arguments. Healthy conflict furnishes an environment or workplace that is open and productive. The teams are single-minded aiming at a common-goal of crafting strategic collaborative choices emphasizing the shared interest of all team …show more content…
A fighting team consists of assembling a diverse team of various background, gender, and industry experience. The fighting team should meet regularly and often to build mutual confidence, trust, and transparency within the team. In dealing with conflict and dissent, the fighting team needs to analyze the issue from multiple facets to gain a broader context and perspective. Consequently, it will require team members to assume roles beyond their obvious signed roles such as playing devil-advocates or sky gazers. Last of all and most importantly, the fighting team must actively manage conflict to avoid the pitfall of confusing lack of conflict with agreement. Leaders encouragement of conflict in healthy ways protects the teams from overlooking consensus as engagement when it’s really
The work place, social organizations, educational institutes, and community groups all use teams to accomplish projects and goals. The environment of teams determine if these projects and goals will be met in an efficient manner. As businesses and organizations continue to restructure work teams, the need for training in disagreement resolution will grow.
In several occasions, conflict occurs in the communication of one or two people. Several people have thought of conflict as cases involving pouring of furious anger in a communication process. Nonetheless, conflict is the misinterpretation of an individual’s words or values (Huan & YAzdanifard, 2012). Conflict can also be due to limited resources in an organization (Riaz & Junaid, 2010). Conflict may as well arise due to poor communication or the use of inappropriate communication channel of transmission of information between the involved parties. Management of conflict has various conflict management styles that include avoidance style, forcing style, passive-aggressive style, accommodating style, collaborating style and compromising style. Workplace conflict comes in two different kinds: task involving conflict, which focuses on the approaches used in resolving the problem and blaming conflict that has the aspects of blame and never brings element of resolving problems between the conflicting parties. In the perception of several individuals, relationship conflict is negative.
Along with the preparation for conflict resolutions, understanding the situation in the team during the conflict is important. Clarifying positions along with listing the facts and all the necessary analyzation of the particular situation helps in resolving the conflict in a team. Applying this process can effectively address and resolve the conflict in a
According to the Theorists as groups turn into teams, most conflict happens in the “storming” stage of team development (De Janasz, Dowd & Schneider, 2001). First, one must understand what conflict is. Capozzoli (1999) cites Boulding’s 1962 definition of conflict as “a situation of competition in which the parties are aware of the incompatibility of potential future positions and in which each party wishes to occupy a position which is incompatible with the wishes of the other.” Conflict can be either constructive or destructive to the team and can be created in several ways. Conflict must be analyzed and understood for the team to resolve it.
“What You Don’t Know About Making Decisions” by David A. Garvin and Michael A. Roberto explores the ways successful leaders can design an effective decision-making process, and the areas one needs to avoid. Some areas that are mention are how leaders should focus on maintaining an Inquiry style decision process, and avoid an Advocacy style decision process. They explore how constructive conflict is desired if its cognitive conflict which allows people to openly express their differences which allows everyone to introduce new ideas. Affective conflict is to be desired, as it is emotional based and cause problems amongst teams. Garvin and Roberto talk about how leaders need to show they were listening to the discussion, and once a final choice is made, leaders need to show logic as to why the decision was made. Garvin and Roberto discuss closure within deliberations, and they talk about a Litmus Test. Throughout the paper Garvin and Roberto discuss many do’s and don’ts about decision making and ways leaders can be successful in running a team.
People work in groups or teams everyday whether in their career, education, political organization, church, or any other social setting. Conflict while working in teams or groups is inevitable. When taking people of different backgrounds, personalities, moral, and ethical beliefs and putting them together in a group, conflict will arise. The key to achieving your team goals is to construct and conquer your goals with keeping the greater good of the team in mind. Conflict as it arises should be combated and abated through swift and thorough resolution techniques. When dealt with properly conflict resolution can give rise to a cohesive and productive team.
Many people enjoy working or participating in a group or team, but when a group of people work together chances are that conflicts will occur. Hazleton describes conflict as the discrepancy between what is the perceived reality and what is seen as ideal (2007). “We enter into conflicts reluctantly, cautiously, angrily, nervously, confidently- and emerge from them battered, exhausted, sad, satisfied, triumphant. And still many of us underestimate or overlook the merits of conflict- the opportunity conflict offers every time it occurs” (Schilling, nd.). Conflict does not have to lead to a hostile environment or to broken relationships. Conflict if resolved effectively can lead to a positive experience for everyone involved. First, there must be an understanding of the reasons why conflicts occur. The conflict must be approached with an open mind. Using specific strategies can lead to a successful resolution for all parties involved. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument states “there are five general approaches to dealing with conflict. The five approaches are avoidance, accommodation, competition, compromise, and collaboration. Conflict resolution is situational and no one approach provides the best or right approach for all circumstances” (Thomas, 2000).
A group can only be called a team if the members are actively working together toward a common goal. A team must have the capability to set goals, make decisions, solve problems, and share responsibilities. For a team to be successful, trust must be earned between its members by being consistent and reliable (Temme & Katzel, 2005). When more than one person is working on a particular task, inconsistent views or opinions commonly arise. People come from different backgrounds and live through different life experiences therefore, even when working towards a common goal, they will not always see eye to eye. Major conflict that is not dealt with can devastate a team or organization (Make Conflict Work, 2008). In some situations, conflict can be more constructive than destructive. Recognizing the difference between conflict that is constructive to the team and conflict that is destructive to the team is important. Trying to prevent the conflict is not always the best way to manage conflict when working within a team setting. Understanding conflict, what causes it, and how to resolve conflict effectively, should consume full concentration.
Thomas, K. W. (1992). Conflict and conflict management: Reflections and update. . Journal Of Organizational Behavior, 13(3), 265-274.
In order of being able to analyze the sources of conflicts regarding the clothing manufacturer, I will present the Conflict Process Model according to McShane and Von Glinow. Therefore, I will first define what conflicts are, and second present the different sources of conflicts and carve out which conflicts are involved regarding to the given case. The third step is to explain two different strategies to minimize these conflicts in future. Finally, I will provide a recommendation and conclusion.
Conflict is a basic aspect of teamwork (Levi, 2001), since the number of decisions that a team needs to make often evokes feelings of discomfort and stress. Conflict very often arises from a clash of different working style, ideas, interests, needs, and wants. Team conflicts can be due to high stress level. It has been experienced that in teamwork there can be conflicts and conflicts creates dissatisfaction among the employees. It is important that conflicts be addressed in such a way that it has adverse effect and it is very important to address the conflicts on the spot otherwise it would be difficult to handle the conflicts. (Jehn, 1995).When team member s disagree about the task themselves that how these tasks should be performed then task related conflicts occurs. It is also called task led-conflicts, it occurs when persons disagree over the understanding of tasks and their goals it is a disagreement between two team members in a group over the decisions. They have differences of opinions about a certain issue. (Stewart, Sims & Manz, 1999). Disagreement can be caused by differences in viewpoint and values, differences of opinion about tasks and differences in expectation about the impact of decisions (Levi, 2001).
Conflict avoidance is a technique used to deal with conflict. Avoiding conflict is mainly used to disregard the direct issue at hand. Avoiding conflict can be used to temporarily get rid of an issue or it can be used to permanently remove the issue. Avoiding conflict within the workplace most often results in relationship division. Workplace conflict is inevitable, meaning wherever and whenever there is a group working to accomplish similar goals as a whole, conflict will be present. Workplace conflict exists due to various factors. (Graham 2014) The most common seen factors influencing workplace conflict include role understanding, meaning who is responsible for what task, how tasks are to be accomplished, personality difference and poor
Gross and Guerrero (2000) supported Rahim’s conflict management styles and identified that these styles are associated with organizational climate and culture, job satisfaction. Their research on 50 employees uncovered some facts include employees who were involved in unmanaged conflict end up in job dissatisfaction and subsequently their performance deters (p. 208). The competence-based model developed by Canary, Cupach and Serpe (2001) contrast with Rahim’s theory, where the effectiveness of conflict management styles is based on the situation and understanding of individuals (p. 81). They tried to find a resolution for the conflict instead of implementing the strategy to reduce tension by applying conflict management styles, resulting in inconsistent outcomes (p. 531).
Baillien et al. (2011) suggest that with non-participatory opportunities limited the violent group, damage rapport with others, and losses trustworthiness of their role in achieving organization plans. Therefore, having a clear understanding of conflict sources creates a sense of assertiveness. Individuals stand for their needs as they respect those of others. Thus a mutual rapport exists where a team is the major driving force for an organization. A win-to-win policy becomes an easy way to reestablish the conflict and best ways to solve
In the workplace, disagreement or arguments may arise due to several reasons. This can further result into a state of antagonism or opposition, resentment, avoidance, verbal assaults, and inability to work together. Such may arise due to personality clashes, differences in style, differences in leadership, interdependence conflicts and differences in the background or gender. With reference to the conflict between Norm and Norma, disagreement arose due to differences in styles. This is because Norma was after quick result from the initiated project while Norm believed he could work from home and still meet the expected standard. However, Norma expected full commitment from all the staff under her. For good working relations, conflicts should always be resolved and hence improve good working relationship among the employees both the juniors and seniors. Professionally, conflicts can be solved via two models; circle of conflict and triangle of satisfaction (Susan Holton, 1998).