Conflict Management

Conflict is a basic fact of life in groups and organizations. Organizations contain people with divergent personalities, perceptions, goals, ideas, values and behaviours. Hence, conflict is an inevitable feature of organizations. Chung and Megginson describes conflict as the struggle between incompatible or opposing needs, wishes, ideas, interests or people. More specifically, “conflict is a process in which an effort is purposefully made by one person or unit to block another that results in frustrating the attainment of the other’s goals or the furthering of his or her interests”.

Conflict is a naturally occurring phenomenon; inevitable; inherent in any system; not always bad and in fact an optimum level of conflict energizes the system. Fosters creativity and innovation, and acts as a catharsis. At the same time if conflict is allowed to develop beyond control, it could tend to become destructive, resulting in such aversive consequences such as strikes, sabotage and other dysfunctional behaviours.

The effective manager must understand the nature of conflict that is beneficial to the organisation and conflict that is not. He must deal with conflict in ways that promote both individual and organizational goals. The management of conflict is an essential prerequisite to sound human relations.

Features

• Conflict occurs when two or more parties pursue mutually exclusive goals, values or events.

• Conflict arises out of differing perceptions.

• Conflict refers to deliberate behaviour.

• Conflict can exist either at the latent or overt level

• In conflict one side sees on opportunity to interfere with the others opportunity to acquire resources or perform activities.

• Conflict is not an organizational abnormality but a normal aspect of social intercourse.

Level of Conflict

Low level of conflict creates conditions of inertia and boredom in the system and excessive conflict results in destruction and dysfunctional tendencies. Managers have to monitor the level of conflict in the system and if there is too little or no conflict at all, the managers may even have to induce some level of conflict to energize the system. As the level of conflict tends to go beyond the optimum level the manager must act to resolve the conflict in a manner that will be beneficial to the organisation.

LEVEL OF CONFLICT

Stages of Conflict Episode

The above model presents conflict as a series of stages namely latent conflict; perceived conflict; felt conflict; manifest conflict and conflict aftermath.

Latent Conflict

Each episode of conflict starts with a ‘latent conflict’ but the actual conflict has not emerged. Factors such as competition for scarce resources, competition for positions in the organisation exist which could become conflicts.

Perceived conflict

This conflicts results in due to the parties misunderstanding of each other true position. One party perceives the other to be likely to thwart or frustrate his goals.

Felt conflict

When the conflict makes one tense or anxious, the conflict is a felt conflict because the difference are personalized or internalized.

Manifest conflict

This is the stage for open confrontation. It takes the form of conflictual behaviour including aggression, sabotage, apathy etc. all of which reduce organization’s effectiveness.

Conflict resolution

When conflict is resolved in some form, it is called conflict resolution.

Conflict aftermath

The aftermath of conflict may be either positive or negative for the organisation depending on how the conflict is resolved. If the conflict is genuinely resolved, it can lead to more enduring relationship between parties; if the conflict is merely suppressed but not resolved, the latent of conflict may be aggravated and explode in more violent and serious forms. This is called ‘conflict aftermath’,

Types of conflicts

Conflicts may take following forms:

CONFLICT

Individual conflict

Inter-individual conflict

Inter-individual or inter-personal conflict involves two or more individuals who hold polarized points of view. The most common reasons for inter-personal conflicts are personality differences, perceptions, clashes of values and interests, and competing for scare resources.

Intra-individual conflict

Intra-individual conflict is internal to the person and probably the most difficult type of conflict to analyze. Basically, intra-personal conflict can be related to two things; conflict arising due to divergent goals or conflict arising from out of multiple roles to be played.

Goal conflict occurs when a goal that an individual is attempting to achieve has both positive and negative features. Generally three separate types of goal conflicts are indentified.

• Approach-approach conflict: A person wants tow positive situations but can have only one.

• Approach-avoidance conflict: In this form of goal conflict the person attempts to achieve a goal that has both positive and negative aspects but wants to avail of positive and negative.

• Avoidance-avoidance conflict: This type of conflict can be resolved because a person faced two negative goals and he may not choose either of them and may simply leave the situation.

Role conflict is the result of divergent role expectations. It exits when the expectations of a job are mutually different or opposite and the individual cannot meet one expectation without rejecting the other. An individual confronting with role conflict will experience psychological stress leading to emotional problems, resulting in poor performance.

Group conflict

Inter-group conflict

Every group is in atleast partial conflict with every other group it interacts with. The groups differ in goals, work activities, power and prestige. The sources of intergroup conflict are incompatible goals, task interdependence, resource allocation, competitive incentive and reward system, differences in values or perception etc. 

Intra-group conflict

Intra-group conflict is essentially same as the bases of inter-individual conflict.

Organizational conflict

Inter-organizational conflict

The bases to inter-organizational conflicts are essentially the same as the bases on inter-oup conflict. The types of inter-organizational conflict are between management and government, management and management, union and government etc.

Intra-organizational conflict

Intra-organisational conflict are mainly three kinds:

• Horizontal conflict: It refers to conflict between employees of departments a the same hierarchical level in an organization.

• Vertical conflict: If refers to any conflict between different hierarchical levels in an organisation. It occurs usually in superior-subordinate relations. The reasons for vertical conflicts are inadequate communication, differences in interest, perception and attitudes between position holders occupying different levels.

• Line and staff conflict: It refers to conflict between line managers and staff specialists.

Conflict Management 

Conflict has to be resolved as soon as the optimum level is crossed and before dysfunctional consequences start occurring. Following are some of the techniques employed to resolve conflict.

Dominance through position

Quiet often managers use positional authority to fire a lower ranking subordinate they consider to be a trouble-maker. Individuals, in organisation, with rare exception, recognize and accept the authority of their superiors as an acceptable way or resolving conflicts. Although they may not be in agreement with these decisions, the abide by them. 

Appeals procedures

The people in disagreements may appeal to higher authority to help them to arrive at a solution by resolving the problem satisfactorily.

Liaison groups

To arbit differences between two warring factions, an arbitrator can be appoint who can use this expertise and persuasion to achieve coordination and get people together.

Reduce interdependence 

On way to resolve conflict is to reduce interdependences. Departments may be provided with resources that are independent of those provided for other departments.