What Is Conflict In Conflict Management

Introduction/Background The word “conflict” when mentioned brings to memory pictures or thoughts of two or more parties struggling, threats, and opposition struggles. A conflict varies and may come in different forms in any organizational settings. In organizational setting, it comes through job retention or desires to be met, employer/employee disagreements and settlement, confidentiality reports and information sharing; all these leads to change in feelings and attitude. However, there are conflict management/resolution challenges facing many organizational settings in the US today such as boss employee relationship and racism. Conflict occurs almost in every profession. It is phenomenal, inevitable but can be managed or controlled.

However, from the organizational setting, it could be as a result of employee’s desire not to keep official matters confidential. Conflict could also arise due to failure of the employer, not honoring certain agreed bargaining. Henry (2009) indicated that if the workers’ right and prerogative is not appropriated rightly, it could cause conflict; such workers’ rights include condition of service, benefits and pay. This author further revealed that conflict actually involves people with different behaviors that appear opposite and working against each other. It is then a disagreement over any issue that arises either as a result of anger, personality misunderstanding or mistrust. However, in a related report, Yarn (2014) worked on “Designing a Conflict Management System for Higher Education”; revealed that grievances filed by employees led to a dysfunctional department which was mired in controversy and beset a continuing acrimony among colleagues. Many victims such as students, faculty members and a couple of secretaries were affected. In my opinion, conflict has no boundaries. A recent study by Ustuner and Kis (2014), investigated “The Relationship between Communication Competencies and Organizational Conflict Levels of Educational Supervisors”, stated that Educations supervisors sometimes experience organizational conflict which included other inter-groups and even with departmental heads. Furthermore, communication

However, it is important to outline some of these conditions that spring conflict that are more related to organizational setting. In the organizational setting, conflict can arise from differences in values, philosophies, goals achievement, in-confidentiality and lack of promotion. Conflicts can start in the office when one party believes that another party is obstructing or stands as a barrier to his or her efforts to rise. Conflict could also arise when the employer is not fulfilling or failed to honor the agreed employment terms. Conflict can be caused by complex patterns of interpersonal and inter-groups that are linked to socioeconomic conditions. For example, in a comparative case study carried out in two multicultural South African schools indicated that conflict in these two schools is multifaceted and caused by a complex pattern of micro factors (interpersonal and intergroup) and macro factors that are linked to socioeconomic conditions. The report further revealed that the issues that were pertinent were discipline, diversity, and multilingualism (Snodgrass, 2009). Interviewers did not see ethnicity as a source of conflict, but rather observed that ‘avoidance” was a key to conflict management. However, based on this report, it is easy to say that the different cultural groups actually added to the “vividness and richness” of South African identity and heritage. In consideration of the above, the