Team Solutions for Conflict Management When co workers form teams they will find that they disagree or need to find ways to express their differences (Engleberg, Wynn, 2006, p. 147). Conflicts may arise from tight deadlines and short tempers, but most team members may not know what to do. "Despite the inevitability of conflict, many of us go out of our way to avoid or suppress it" (Engleberg, 2006, p. 147). When working in a team environment, co workers must find effective solutions for the numerous conflicts that may arise. According to Jim Temme et al. (1995), "Teams must set their own goals, make decisions, and solve problems" (Temme, Katzel, 1995, para. 5). The most common ways conflicts arise are from the "struggle between incompatible and opposing needs, wishes, ideas, interests, or people" (DeJanasz, Dowd, Schneifer, 2001 p. 243). Other forms of conflict arise when team members have different values, attitudes, needs, expectations, perceptions, resources, and personalities (Capozzoli, 1995, para. 9). Many employers do not offer sessions on how to handle conflicts, so employees are not aware of effective strategies available to help team members deal with their differences. Conflicts can come from almost any type of communication Understanding different types of conflicts and how to resolve them is the best first step. Positive and Negative Conflicts There are both positive and negative conflicts. Conflicts are mostly associated with "quarreling, fighting, anger, and hostility" (Engleberg, Wynn, 2006, p. 147). Not all conflicts need to become negative. A conflict can be positive when managed or resolved effectively (Capozzoli, 1995, para. 5). These conflicts challenge co workers and can lead to better results. They can lead to increased involvement, cohesion, innovation, and creativity from team members. They can also show positive personal growth, change, and clarify both values and key issues (DeJanasz, Dowd, Schneifer, 2001 p. 244). Through positive conflicts, the "quality of decision making improves as opposing viewpoints and concerns are discussed" (Engleberg, Wynn, 2006, p. 149). Groups who are committed to positive conflicts share similar principles such as members being able to disagree and still respect each other (Engleberg, 2006, p. 149). They are also not afraid to disagree with higher ranked group members, know that their disagreements will not be punished, and have an agreed-upon approach for resolving their conflicts and making decisions (Engleberg, 2006, p.149). Negative conflicts can lead to employees feeling as though they have lost sight of the team's goal because of constant bickering or arguing among team members.
Conflict within the team can be healthy if well managed and there is a pre-set common goal the team is working towards. Conflict comes sometime due to differences in perception and cultural differences. These have to be harnessed to avoid “group-think” rather than allowing for ‘information seeker’ to thrive so as to bring the best out of the team work through critical questioning (A Primer on Communications Studies, 2012).
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.
While Mike believes that conflict is a normal part of any organization, and the real challenge is how one deals with it. He then provides you with his “5 Keys of Dealing with Workplace Conflict,” (Myatt, 2012) which are: “Define Acceptable Behavior, Hit Conflict Head-on, Understanding the WIIFM Factor, The Importance Factor, and View Conflict as Opportunity.” (Myatt, 2012) What I have learned for this article is, that in order to be a good leader, you need to know how to deal with conflict, employ effective conflict resolution, while also avoided unnecessary
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
... resolution via coaching, constructive criticism and positive actions. Additional measures may need to be taken should behavioral issues persist to include the termination of team membership and/or repercussions for non-active participation. Resolving negative issues by turning performance around can only be accomplished when team members clearly understand their role within the team and the importance of their participation. This occurs with the encouragement and support of all team members; hence team morale improves in addition to team productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness.
As the processes and systems used in business have become more complex, teams, not individuals, have become popular in many organizations. Teams are made up of individuals from an organization brought together to solve a problem, improve a process or implement a new process. “A major advantage that a team has over an individual is its diversity of resources and ideas” (Burns, 1995, p. 52). However, this diversity can cause conflict within the team. The success of the team is strongly influenced by the team’s ability to recognize the causes of, manage and resolve conflict.
It can arise within the workplace between co-workers, mangers, bosses and so on. One of the main reason conflict occur is competition between resources such as supplies, money or incompetent management. It is also happening when there’s goal differences between employees in the organization. Also conflict will most likely happen when there’s misunderstanding in communication. In a workplace environment, conflict can be encountered by customer service employees and a other team members on an everyday basis, depending on the business. A most common conflict experiences by most are a dissatisfied customer who is not really happy with the service or other members in the workplace are not doing there work well. For example, the team member never pays attention to the finer details, resulting in the team being held responsible for errors.It often means tasks have to be checked and redone by other team members. This then will cause conflict among the employees within the workplace. It is important for every employees to work to maintain the same standards.Consistency and equality fosters mutual respect in the workplace and the workers.Managing conflict is a key management competency within organizations and should be addressed immediately. Leaders in turn need to manage individual performance before it becomes an issue for the
For a team to be successful there are several factors that have to be addressed in order for a fluent, functioning group of individuals combined to achieve a certain goal. This goal can be a variety of different endings from producing minor results to making decisions that create a major impact on a large scale. Within a team environment conflict is always presence. Conflict is essential to the advancement of teams and must be managed in a proper way to avoid destruction and division amongst the group of individuals. From sports, to education, and the workplace teamwork is present in everyday life. As a human race we all work in different team oriented situations in order to accomplish a variety of tasks.
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.
Conflict can occur anywhere from the around the water cooler or in the meeting on how the team will reach their goal. Many things a day can lead to a small or large conflict. It is important to remember that conflict is a natural part of life and everyone will experience conflict at some time when participating on a team.
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.
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 is energy, conflict is excitement, conflict is often driven by a passion that is necessary to progression. In other words, we need many of the characteristics that might cause conflict and conflict itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The important thing is learning how to manage
The case is about team conflict because it involves a team work. We have a group of employees working on a project which has a common goal to implement safety database tracking system for their company (international pharmaceutical company).
Conflict exists in every organization as a result of incompatible needs, goals, and objectives of two people while aligning to the overall business requirements. Though disagreement is linked with negative impact, the approach has healthy considerations (Leung, 2008). For instance, some conflicts create an avenue for the exchange of ideas and creativity to meet the set organizational purposes. However, damaging disagreement in organizations results in employee dissatisfaction, turnover, and poor services and reduced productivity. The paper establishes different types of interpersonal conflict and key resolution strategies used to address the problem. Human resource managers need to have the capacity to identify different levels of conflicts and the best methods to negate them.