Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Conflict management strategies
Theory of conflict management
Theory of conflict management
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
We each possess unique ideas, opinions, beliefs, and feelings about specific situations in life. This uniqueness is a large part of what makes us human. Because we all have our own individual way of looking at things, we each have a different viewpoint on what is proper or improper. With all that variation in society conflict is inevitable! Conflict is antagonistic in nature and we all must find ways to work through conflict issues both at work and at home. This paper describes different types of conflict, the influences I personally had in learning to deal with those conflicts, some of the conflicts that I commonly experience, how I go about dealing with those conflicts, and how conflict affects me on a personal level. There are four main …show more content…
Your parent’s actions play a vital role in determining what type of conflict manager you will be. Like so many things in life, conflict styles are learned behavior. My parents divorced when I was 4 years old. Growing up in a broken home can be challenging and the impact on your life is far reaching. However, I am fortunate to have wonderful step-parents on both sides. Essentially having 4 parents afforded me the chance to experience many different styles of conflict resolution while I was young. My mother tends to be very head-strong and prefers to have things done in a very exact way. I think it is safe to say she was my earliest example of forcing or what is sometimes referred to as competing. My stepfather has never been one to be bothered with trying to solve, force, or accommodate anyone. Instead, he was my primary example of avoiding. Most decisions were made and enforced by my mother and that seemed to suit him. In contrast, my biological father is an unparalleled collaborator and is great at finding creative solutions that tend to work well for almost everyone involved. Lastly, my stepmother believes firmly in compromise. I have always believed she holds everyone as equals and as such everyone should be willing to give something up for the greater good of the group. I would like to think that exposure to all these different approaches has given me a well-rounded perspective on conflict. If I had to narrow …show more content…
This elasticity in your approach to choosing which conflict style is best for the current situation is a key to managing conflict. No one style of conflict resolution will work all the time when addressing issues. You must remain flexible to other people’s wants, needs, direction, criticism, schedules, moods, temperament, and a myriad of other things in life. If there is one thing in life that will never change it is the fact that everything is going to change! There is nothing you can do to stop it, so the quicker you learn how to adapt to the changes the better off you will be. The ability to change your approach to dealing with conflict better prepares you to face the interpersonal challenges that will eventually come your way. I believe it is important to also remember that you cannot win every battle with every person you encounter. Knowing that you cannot fix or solve every problem with everyone is very helpful in reducing stress and managing difficult situations with others. My father dislikes when I use this cliché but sometimes, it is what it
This approach directly addresses the conflict and is often viewed as “might makes right” (Robin, 2002). A confrontational style usually involves high emotional levels, clear clarity of goals, weak relationship, and low concern for formalities or fear of punishment, moderate concerns for traditions, and a moderate self-concept.
As much as some of us dislike conflict, it is inherent in human nature. After all, it is like a wall that keeps us from moving forward in the path of life, but we must understand that those walls merely act as temporary challenges that are yet to be solved. Some conflicts may be insignificantly trivial, and some may be quite immense. Some conflicts may be happening within ourselves, and some may be accompanied by another person. Regardless, we must learn not to run away from conflict, but rather to run over them with a determined demeanor as the conflicts that we encounter in our lives are what helps us learn and grow as an individual. Furthermore, learning and growing from conflict is what shape individuals and what prepares us for the upcoming challenges that life will throw at us in the future.
We all go thru different phases and life changes in our lives creating more needs and solutions to our problems. Many of us handle conflict negatively and think conflict is bad. Therefore, the best way to resolve conflict is learning how to handle things in a better way. This means understanding the person and understanding what has created the conflict and miscommunication. The book, “Difficult Conversations,” helps us learn different perspectives and needs to our conflicts and learning how to resolve conflict and what has created people to have different standards in their personal culture.
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.
Handling conflict is not an easy thing to do as we often times are faced with life's circumstances daily, we encounter problems and situations all the time and some people often shy away from conflict simply because they do not like conflict so they simply try to avoid it at all cost, but conflict is inevitable we are going to have problems but the specific question is how to handle conflict?
When two (or more) individuals who must interact together, have different goals or ideas, a conflict arises. Although DeVito does provide a decent, summarized definition of interpersonal conflict as a “disagreement between or among interdependent individuals who perceive their goals as incompatible,” (DeVito, 241) it is important to include Dr. Hamlet’s expansion that “concern[s] scarce resources or mutually exclusive goals” (Hamlett, Interpersonal). Including this expansion broadens the definition of conflict and allows for added conflict management strategies.
Conerly (2004), further states two things attribute to the way conflict is managed. One is the importance of meeting your own goals and the other is the importance you attribute to relationships and wanting to get along with others.
Four sources of conflict presented by Lamberton & Minor (2014) are content, values, negotiation-of-selves and institutionalized will be discussed. Awareness of and knowing what causes conflict is important in strategizing ideas and plans to resolve them. Explanations and examples of these four sources will follow. The outcome and process of resolving conflict can affect what direction and success we achieve personally and
Interpersonal conflict is very common with many relationships. It occurs when two people can not meet in the middle or agree on a discussion. Cooperation is key to maintaining a healthy debate. More frequently; when dealing with members of your own family, issues arise that include conflict and resolution. During this process our true conflict management style appears “out of thin air”. (Steve A. Beebe, 2008, p. 191).
Conflict can be perceived in different ways of positively communicating about a topic or negatively, but one thing that can’t argued is that conflict occurs in everyday life and there’s no way of escaping it. One form of conflict that occurs frequently due to constant interaction is in the workplace. Many people see workplace conflicts as just disputes between coworkers, when there are many forms of personal conflicts between those coworkers and bosses such as
I have had the same manager for almost four years now, and he has really helped me reshape the way that I address conflicts. He’s like a dad to me and we have extremely similar personalities. Because we have a close personal and professional relationship, there are more opportunities for a conflict to develop between us, and so most of the conflicts I have are with him. He understands better than anyone what bothers me, and what kind of reactions I will have to something, and usually has a good idea of why I feel that way. After a conflict, which is usually something minor, we talk things out in more detail, in a calmer manner. He points out to me things that I do when I start to get annoyed and need to work on and I do the same for him. Since
Before understanding how to deal with conflict, one must understand what conflict is. Conflict can be defined as, “any situation in which incompatible goals, cognitions, or emotions within or between individuals or groups lead to opposition or antagonistic interaction” (Learning Team Toolkit, 2004, pp 242-243). Does the idea of conflict always have to carry a negative connotation? The growth and development of society would be a great deal slower if people never challenged each other’s ideas. The Learning Team Toolkit discusses three different views of conflict: traditiona...
Conflict theory are perspective in sociology psychology that accentuate the social, political, or material inequality of a social group, that analysis the broad socio-political system, or that weaken from structural functionalism and ideological conservatism. With conflict theory, you will see tensions, status, and power are unevenly distributed between groups in society, which these conflicts become the purpose of social change. Conflict theory usually arise due to competition and limited resource that is feed by domination and power, rather than consensus and conformity. This is seen a lot on macro level. As a social worker, you will see and use conflict theory throughout your professional.
Does your way of dealing with conflict define who you are? Everyone around the world deals with conflict in many ways. People can be confident when confronted with conflict. Others can be terrified when they confront conflict.
Conflict is unavoidable and connected to a world where different ideas and opinions are challenged. Negative conflict occurs when voices are not expressed appropriately, discussions are not in control or different parties reject moving forward with a solution. There is difficulty resolving disagreements because there are multiple reactions to disputes. However, a positive conflict supports debates without a destructive outcome. They improve communication, introduce principles that are important to others, and reduce chaos. On the other hand, the approach that a person uses to address conflict dictates the outcome they receive. Methods for resolving conflict include avoiding the problem, smoothing out a situation, competing against the ideas