Conflict management

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Conflict management is the process of limiting the negative aspects of conflict while increasing the positive aspects of conflict in the workplace. The aim of conflict management is to enhance learning and group outcomes, including effectiveness or performance in an organizational setting. Properly managed conflict can improve group outcomes. [1]

Contents

Conflict resolution

Conflict resolution involves the process of the reducing, eliminating, or terminating of all forms and types of conflict. Five styles for conflict management, as identified by Thomas and Kilmann, are: competing, compromising, collaborating, avoiding, and accommodating. [2]

Businesses can benefit from appropriate types and levels of conflict. That is the aim of conflict management, [3] and not the aim of conflict rejection.[ citation needed ] Conflict management does not imply conflict resolution.

Conflict management minimizes the negative outcomes of conflict and promotes the positive outcomes of conflict with the goal of improving learning in an organization. [4] [5]

Properly managed conflict increases organizational learning by increasing the number of questions asked and encourages people to challenge the status quo. [6]

Organizational conflict at the interpersonal level includes disputes between peers as well as supervisor-subordinate conflict. Party-directed mediation (PDM) is a mediation approach particularly suited for disputes between co-workers, colleagues or peers, especially deep-seated interpersonal conflict, multicultural or multiethnic disputes. The mediator listens to each party separately in a pre-caucus or pre-mediation before ever bringing them into a joint session. Part of the pre-caucus also includes coaching and role plays. The idea is that the parties learn how to converse directly with their adversary in the joint session. Some unique challenges arise when organizational disputes involve supervisors and subordinates. The Negotiated Performance Appraisal (NPA) is a tool for improving communication between supervisors and subordinates and is particularly useful as an alternate mediation model because it preserves the hierarchical power of supervisors while encouraging dialogue and dealing with differences in opinion. [7]

Orientations to conflict

There are three orientations to conflict: lose-lose, win-lose, and win-win. The lose-lose orientation is a type of conflict that tends to end negatively for all parties involved. A win-lose orientation results in one victorious party, usually at the expense of the other. The win-win orientation is one of the most essential concepts to conflict resolution. A win-win solution arrived at by integrative bargaining may be close to optimal for both parties. This approach engages in a cooperative approach rather than a competitive one. [8]

Although the win-win concept is the ideal orientation, the notion that there can only be one winner is constantly being reinforced in American culture:

"The win-lose orientation is manufactured in our society in athletic competition, admission to academic programs, industrial promotion systems, and so on. Individuals tend to generalize from their objective win-lose situations and apply these experiences to situations that are not objectively fixed-pies". [9]

This kind of mentality can be destructive when communicating with different cultural groups by creating barriers in negotiation, resolution and compromise; it can also lead the "loser" to feel mediocre. When the win-win orientation is absent in negotiation, different responses to conflict may be observed. [10]

Early conflict management models

Blake and Mouton (1964) were among the first to present a conceptual scheme for classifying the modes (styles) for handling interpersonal conflicts in five types: forcing, withdrawing, smoothing, compromising, and problem solving.

In the 1970s and 1980s, researchers began using the intentions of the parties involved to classify the styles of conflict management that they included in their models. Both Thomas (1976) and Pruitt (1983) put forth a model based on the concerns of the parties involved in the conflict. The combination of the parties' concern for their own interests (i.e. assertiveness) and their concern for the interests of those across the table (i.e. cooperativeness) yielded a particular conflict management style. Pruitt called these styles yielding (low assertiveness/high cooperativeness), problem solving (high assertiveness/high cooperativeness), inaction (low assertiveness/low cooperativeness), and contending (high assertiveness/low cooperativeness). Pruitt argues that problem-solving is the preferred method when seeking mutually beneficial options (win-win).

Khun and Poole's model

Khun and Poole (2000) established a similar system of group conflict management. In their system, they split Kozan's confrontational model into two sub-models: distributive and integrative.[ citation needed ]

DeChurch and Marks's meta-taxonomy

DeChurch and Marks (2001) examined the literature available on conflict management at the time and Ni established what they claimed was a "meta-taxonomy" that encompasses all other models.

They argued that all other styles have inherent in them into two dimensions:

In the study DeChurch and Marks conducted to validate this division, activeness did not have a significant effect on the effectiveness of conflict resolution, but the agreeableness of the conflict management style, whatever it was, did have a positive impact on how groups felt about the way the conflict was managed, regardless of the outcome.

Rahim's meta-model

Rahim (2002) noted that there is agreement among management scholars that there is no one best approach to how to make decisions, lead or manage conflict.

In a similar vein, rather than creating a very specific model of conflict management, Rahim created a meta-model (in much the same way that DeChurch and Marks, 2001, created a meta-taxonomy) for conflict styles based on two dimensions, concern for self and concern for others.

Within this framework are five management approaches: integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising.

International conflict management

Special consideration should be paid to conflict management between two parties from distinct cultures. In addition to the everyday sources of conflict, "misunderstandings, and from this counterproductive, pseudo conflicts, arise when members of one culture are unable to understand culturally determined differences in communication practices, traditions, and thought processing". [12] Indeed, this has already been observed in the business research literature.

Renner (2007) recounted several episodes where managers from developed countries moved to less developed countries to resolve conflicts within the company and met with little success due to their failure to adapt to the conflict management styles of the local culture.

As an example, in Kozan's study noted above, he noted that Asian cultures are far more likely to use a harmony model of conflict management. If a party operating from a harmony model comes in conflict with a party using a more confrontational model, misunderstandings above and beyond those generated by the conflict itself will arise.

International conflict management, and the cultural issues associated with it, is one of the primary areas of research in the field at the time, as existing research is insufficient to deal with the ever-increasing contact occurring between international entities.

Interorganizational conflict management

One of the key features of conflict management in inter-organizational relationships is the involvement of both an individual level and an organizational level. In inter-organizational relationships, [13] conflicts have to be managed through a set of formal and informal governance mechanisms. [14] These mechanisms influence the likelihood and type of conflicts but also the way conflicts are managed between the parties.

Application

Higher education

With only 14% of researched universities reporting mandatory courses in this subject, and with up to 25% of the manager day being spent on dealing with conflict, education needs to reconsider the importance of this subject. The subject warrants emphasis on enabling students to deal with conflict management. [15]

"Providing more conflict management training in undergraduate business programs could help raise the emotional intelligence of future managers." The improvement of emotional intelligence found that employees were more likely to use problem-solving skills, instead of trying to bargain. [16]

Students need to have a good set of social skills. Good communication skills allow the manager to accomplish interpersonal situations and conflict. Instead of focusing on conflict as a behavior issue, focus on the communication of it. [17]

With an understanding of the communications required, the student will gain the aptitude needed to differentiate between the nature and types of conflicts. These skills also teach that relational and procedural conflict needs a high degree of immediacy to resolution. If these two conflicts are not dealt with quickly, an employee will become dissatisfied or perform poorly. [18]

It is also the responsibility of companies to react. One option is to identify the skills needed in-house, but if the skills for creating workplace fairness are already lacking, it may be best to seek assistance from an outside organization, such as a developmental assessment center.

According to Rupp, Baldwin, and Bashur, these organizations "have become a popular means for providing coaching, feedback, and experiential learning opportunities". [19] Their main focus is fairness and how it impacts employees' attitudes and performance.

These organizations teach competencies and what they mean. [20] The students then participate in simulations. Multiple observers assess and record what skills are being used and then return this feedback to the participant. After this assessment, participants are then given another set of simulations to utilize the skills learned. Once again they receive additional feedback from observers, in hopes that the learning can be used in their workplace.

The feedback the participant receives is detailed, behaviorally specific, and high quality. This is needed for the participant to learn how to change their behavior. [20] In this regard, it is also important that the participant take time to self-reflect so that learning may occur.

Once an assessment program is utilized, action plans may be developed based on quantitative and qualitative data. [21]

Counseling

When personal conflict leads to frustration and loss of efficiency, counseling may prove to be a helpful antidote. Although few organizations can afford the luxury of having professional counselors on the staff, given some training, managers may be able to perform this function. Nondirective counseling, or "listening with understanding", is little more than being a good listener — something every manager should be. [22]

Sometimes the simple process of being able to vent one's feelings—that is; to express them to a concerned and understanding listener–is enough to relieve frustration and make it possible for the frustrated individual to advance to a problem-solving frame of mind, better able to cope with a personal difficulty that is affecting his work adversely. The nondirective approach is one effective way for managers to deal with frustrated subordinates and co-workers. [23]

There are other more direct and more diagnostic ways that might be used in appropriate circumstances. The great strength of the nondirective approach (nondirective counseling is based on the client-centered therapy of Carl Rogers), however, lies in its simplicity, its effectiveness, and the fact that it deliberately avoids the manager-counselor's diagnosing and interpreting emotional problems, which would call for special psychological training. No one has ever been harmed by being listened to sympathetically and understandingly. On the contrary, this approach has helped many people to cope with problems that were interfering with their effectiveness on the job. [23]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Negotiation</span> Dialogue intended to reach an agreement

Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more parties to resolve points of difference, gain an advantage for an individual or collective, or craft outcomes to satisfy various interests. The parties aspire to agree on matters of mutual interest. The agreement can be beneficial for all or some of the parties involved. The negotiators should establish their own needs and wants while also seeking to understand the wants and needs of others involved to increase their chances of closing deals, avoiding conflicts, forming relationships with other parties, or maximizing mutual gains. Distributive negotiations, or compromises, are conducted by putting forward a position and making concessions to achieve an agreement. The degree to which the negotiating parties trust each other to implement the negotiated solution is a major factor in determining the success of a negotiation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Job satisfaction</span> Attitude of a person towards work

Job satisfaction, employee satisfaction or work satisfaction is a measure of workers' contentment with their job, whether they like the job or individual aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or supervision. Job satisfaction can be measured in cognitive (evaluative), affective, and behavioral components. Researchers have also noted that job satisfaction measures vary in the extent to which they measure feelings about the job. or cognitions about the job.

Conflict resolution is conceptualized as the methods and processes involved in facilitating the peaceful ending of conflict and retribution. Committed group members attempt to resolve group conflicts by actively communicating information about their conflicting motives or ideologies to the rest of group and by engaging in collective negotiation. Dimensions of resolution typically parallel the dimensions of conflict in the way the conflict is processed. Cognitive resolution is the way disputants understand and view the conflict, with beliefs, perspectives, understandings and attitudes. Emotional resolution is in the way disputants feel about a conflict, the emotional energy. Behavioral resolution is reflective of how the disputants act, their behavior. Ultimately a wide range of methods and procedures for addressing conflict exist, including negotiation, mediation, mediation-arbitration, diplomacy, and creative peacebuilding.

A virtual team usually refers to a group of individuals who work together from different geographic locations and rely on communication technology such as email, instant messaging, and video or voice conferencing services in order to collaborate. The term can also refer to groups or teams that work together asynchronously or across organizational levels. Powell, Piccoli and Ives (2004) define virtual teams as "groups of geographically, organizationally and/or time dispersed workers brought together by information and telecommunication technologies to accomplish one or more organizational tasks." As documented by Gibson (2020), virtual teams grew in importance and number during 2000-2020, particularly in light of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic which forced many workers to collaborate remotely with each other as they worked from home.

Power distance is the unequal distribution of power between parties, and the level of acceptance of that inequality; whether it is in the family, workplace, or other organizations.

Conflict resolution is any reduction in the severity of a conflict. It may involve conflict management, in which the parties continue the conflict but adopt less extreme tactics; settlement, in which they reach agreement on enough issues that the conflict stops; or removal of the underlying causes of the conflict. The latter is sometimes called "resolution", in a narrower sense of the term that will not be used in this article. Settlements sometimes end a conflict for good, but when there are deeper issues – such as value clashes among people who must work together, distressed relationships, or mistreated members of one's ethnic group across a border – settlements are often temporary.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Onboarding</span> Management jargon

Onboarding or organizational socialization is the American term for the mechanism through which new employees acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, and behaviors to become effective organizational members and insiders. In standard English, this is referred to as "induction". In the United States, up to 25% of workers are organizational newcomers engaged in onboarding process.

Greenberg (1987) introduced the concept of organizational justice with regard to how an employee judges the behavior of the organization and the employee's resulting attitude and behaviour. For example, if a firm makes redundant half of the workers, an employee may feel a sense of injustice with a resulting change in attitude and a drop in productivity.

Organizational conflict, or workplace conflict, is a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests between people working together. Conflict takes many forms in organizations. There is the inevitable clash between formal authority and power and those individuals and groups affected. There are disputes over how revenues should be divided, how the work should be done, and how long and hard people should work. There are jurisdictional disagreements among individuals, departments, and between unions and management. There are subtler forms of conflict involving rivalries, jealousies, personality clashes, role definitions, and struggles for power and favor. There is also conflict within individuals – between competing needs and demands – to which individuals respond in different ways.

Job performance assesses whether a person performs a job well. Job performance, studied academically as part of industrial and organizational psychology, also forms a part of human resources management. Performance is an important criterion for organizational outcomes and success. John P. Campbell describes job performance as an individual-level variable, or something a single person does. This differentiates it from more encompassing constructs such as organizational performance or national performance, which are higher-level variables.

Participative decision-making (PDM) is the extent to which employers allow or encourage employees to share or participate in organizational decision-making. According to Cotton et al., the format of PDM could be formal or informal. In addition, the degree of participation could range from zero to 100% in different participative management (PM) stages.

Counterproductive work behavior (CWB) is employee's behavior that goes against the legitimate interests of an organization. This behavior can harm the organization, other people within it, and other people and organizations outside it, including employers, other employees, suppliers, clients, patients and citizens. It has been proposed that a person-by-environment interaction (the relationship between a person's psychological and physical capacities and the demands placed on those capacities by the person's social and physical environment.) can be utilized to explain a variety of counterproductive behaviors. For instance, an employee who is high on trait anger is more likely to respond to a stressful incident at work with CWB.

Workplace incivility has been defined as low-intensity deviant behavior with ambiguous intent to harm the target. Uncivil behaviors are characteristically rude and discourteous, displaying a lack of regard for others. The authors hypothesize there is an "incivility spiral" in the workplace made worse by "asymmetric global interaction".

The Conflict Lens is an on-line conflict management tool which identifies an individual's behavior in conflict situations and assesses the outcome.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Conflict (process)</span> Friction, disagreement, or discord within a group

A conflict is a situation, in which inacceptable differences in interests, values, expectations and opinions occur in or between individuals or groups.

In sociology, intragroup conflict refers to conflict between two or more members of the same group or team. In recent years, intragroup conflict has received a large amount of attention in conflict and group dynamics literature. This increase in interest in studying intragroup conflict may be a natural corollary of the ubiquitous use of work groups and work teams across all levels of organizations, including decision-making task forces, project groups, or production teams. Jehn identified two main types of intragroup conflict: task conflict and relationship conflict.

Psychological safety is the belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes. In teams, it refers to team members believing that they can take risks without being shamed by other team members. In psychologically safe teams, team members feel accepted and respected contributing to a better "experience in the workplace". It is also the most studied enabling condition in group dynamics and team learning research.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Team effectiveness</span> A teams ability to accomplish their goals or objectives

Team effectiveness is the capacity a team has to accomplish the goals or objectives administered by an authorized personnel or the organization. A team is a collection of individuals who are interdependent in their tasks, share responsibility for outcomes, and view themselves as a unit embedded in an institutional or organizational system which operates within the established boundaries of that system. Teams and groups have established a synonymous relationship within the confines of processes and research relating to their effectiveness while still maintaining their independence as two separate units, as groups and their members are independent of each other's role, skill, knowledge or purpose versus teams and their members, who are interdependent upon each other's role, skill, knowledge and purpose.

Team diversity refers to the differences between individual members of a team that can exist on various dimensions like age, nationality, religious background, functional background or task skills, sexual orientation, and political preferences, among others. Different types of diversity include demographic, personality and functional diversity, and can have positive as well as negative effects on team outcomes. Diversity can impact performance, team member satisfaction or the innovative capacity of a team. According to the Input-Process-Output Model, team diversity is considered an input factor that has effects on the processes as well as on the team outputs of team work.

Personal initiative (PI) is self-starting and proactive behavior that overcomes barriers to achieve a goal. The concept was developed by Michael Frese and coworkers in the 1990s.

References

  1. Alpert, Tjosvaldo, & Law, 2000; Bodtker & Jameson, 2001; Rahim & Bonoma, 1979; Kuhn & Poole, 2000; DeChurch & Marks, 2001
  2. Technical Brief for the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode, CPP Research Department, 2007
  3. "Conflict Management: Definition, Strategies, and Styles". Coursera. Retrieved 2022-11-15.
  4. Rahim, 2002, p. 208
  5. Altaf, Muddaser (2018-02-12). "Conflict management". muddaser.com/.
  6. Luthans, Rubach, & Marsnik, 1995
  7. Party-Directed Mediation: Facilitating Dialogue Between Individuals (on-line 3rd Edition, 2014) by Gregorio Billikopf, University of California
  8. Davidson and Wood 2
  9. Spangle and Isenhart 14
  10. Segal, Saranne. "The Art of Win-Win Negotiation: When Conflict Meets Cooperation". Segal Conflict Solutions. Retrieved 22 May 2023.
  11. Rahim, 2002
  12. Borisoff & Victor, 1989
  13. Druckman, Daniel; Singer, Jerome E; Cott, Harold Van, eds. (1997). Read "Enhancing Organizational Performance" at NAP.edu. doi:10.17226/5128. ISBN   978-0-309-46623-3.
  14. Harmon, Derek J.; Kim, Peter H.; Mayer, Kyle J. (2015). "Breaking the letter vs. spirit of the law: How the interpretation of contract violations affects trust and the management of relationships". Strategic Management Journal. 36 (4): 497–517. doi: 10.1002/smj.2231 .
  15. Lang, p. 240
  16. Lang, p. 241
  17. Myers & Larson, 2005, p. 307
  18. Myers & Larson, p. 313
  19. Rupp, Baldwin & Bashshur, 2006, p. 145
  20. 1 2 Rupp et al., p. 146
  21. Rupp et al., p. 159
  22. Henry P Knowles; Börje O Saxberg (1971). Personality and leadership behavior. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. Chapter 8. OCLC   118832.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  23. 1 2 Richard Arvid Johnson (1976). Management, systems, and society : an introduction . Pacific Palisades, Calif.: Goodyear Pub. Co. pp.  148–142. ISBN   978-0-87620-540-2. OCLC   2299496.