Management - Conflict

Introduction to conflict

The term conflict referred to perceived incompatible differenced resulting in some form of interference or opposition. Conflict is a natural part of organizational life because the goals between mangers and workers are often incompatible. If people perceive that differences exist then conflict state exists. Conflict is not exists between individual only, it also can exist between departments and divisions that compete for resources or even because of overlapped authority.

However, conflict is a force that needed to be managed or to be resolved but can not be eliminated. Unless is fully resolved, it may remain latent in the situation as a lingering basis for future conflicts over or related to a same matter. Therefore, true conflict resolution is to eliminate the underlying causes of conflict and reduces the potential for similar conflicts in the future.

Moreover, the conflict management was rated as being more important than decisions making, leadership, or communication skills, since the ability to handle conflict was positively related to managerial success. Therefore, the conflict management skills are the most important interpersonal skills a manager needs.

Managers struggle daily to effectively manage or resolve conflict. Understanding how the types and sources of conflict differ could how managers in dealing with conflict.

The types of the Conflict

It is divided into several types sources of the conflict, , they are interpersonal, intargroup and interorganization. Interpersonal conflict is conflict between individual members of an organization, it occurs due to their different goals or values; Intragroup conflict is conflict that arises between a group, team or department, it arises mainly on the policy of resources allocation; Interorganization conflict is conflict that arises across organizations, it occurs because of poor behavior on ethic or one organization feel that they are threatened by the other organization.

The sources of Conflict

The sources of conflict can be basically separated into three categories which are communication differences, structural differences and personal differences.

Communication differences mean the failure of two individuals to share fully the meaning of a communicative attempt. It is arises from semantic difficulties, misunderstandings, and noise in communication channels. There maybe disagreements caused by different role requirement, unit goals, personalities, value systems or other factors.

Since in an organization, people and tasks are divided into departments to accomplish an organizationЎ¦s goals, departments may only concern on their own department efficiency and cost controlling. Therefore, they have incompatible goals and time horizons, as a result there can be conflict. For example, a production department may have there own production plan to produce a product and avoid paying production workers overtime in order to cut down costs. However, the Marketing department thinks that it is important to deliver the product to their customer on time and paying overtime to workers is a kind of responsibility to their customers. Sometimes, there are two or more managers or departments would think that they had authority over a certain activities or tasks, and claim authority on the same tasks. But most of managers are reluctant to share power with others.

Structural differences create problems of integration. Individuals disagree over goals, decision alternatives, performance criteria and resource allocations. There maybe task independencies when a group project starts, some of the group members may fail to get things done on time. However, these group members are come from different department, by their different views on goals and time horizons, it creates conflict.

Furthermore, Independent groups, teams or departments will have different ways in evaluation or reward systems can cause conflict. For example, Production managers will reward to their subordinates when they can lower costs in the process of production, in contrast, Marketing managers will reward to their subordinates for generating sales successfully and customer satisfaction, they would not concern the costs they spent.

On the other hand, resources scarcity is also the underlying cause of conflicts. As we know that management is the approach to acquire, develop, protect and allocation resources efficient and effective, therefore scare of resources makes managing work more difficult and conflict will exist.

Personal differences imply that the individual has different background, education, experience and set of values and these are the potential factors of conflict. As a result, individual may have diverse respond or behavior and which maybe unexpected