Conflict Management Styles

Introduction

        Organizational Behavior has taught me that conflict is defined as a process that begins when one party perceives that another party has negatively affected, or is about to negatively affect, something that the first party cares about. Most individuals have dealt with this situation because there will always be one person who will try to disagree with your opinion no matter what the concept is about. To prevent conflict, individuals should avoid having to be right all the time and giving the individual a chance to speak so they can express their opinion. It can be divided into three types of conflict which are task, relationship and process conflict. As individuals, we should understand that conflict can easily be avoided if we want to. Overall, conflict occurs when individuals don’t respect each other’s values or decisions being made.

Comfort Level with Conflict

        Throughout this semester, I found the concept of diversity in organizations interesting because it helps readers understand the importance of being diverse and knowing people from other cultures that is not your own. In my opinion, individuals tend to always have stereotypes of other cultures because they have not been exposed to what diversity is. Understanding each other’s biographical characteristics is beneficial because it’s what identifies who we are.  Another concept that got my attention was personality and values because as humans we should be able to know our personality type because it helps us understand why we act the way we do. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicators is one of the most widely used personality assessments in the world. This assessment gives the individual a trait that they belong to depending on what they answered. However, another assessment being used is Big Five model, which describes five basic dimensions of personality. In my opinion, those assessments were accurate because they described the type of individual that I am today. It’s important to understand each other’s personality because it tends to eliminate conflict. In my opinion, I am beyond comfortable dealing with conflict because I have gone through problems with individual’s hat have helped me resolve the conflict.  At the beginning of my life cycle it was hard because I didn’t know the right words or how to deal with a conflict between someone who didn’t agree with my decisions or values. Later after dealing with conflict I started to feel more confident about myself and I had no problem defending my values or decisions. The best thing to do when dealing with conflict is to respect the other person’s decision and try to avoid conflict because you won’t always be right.  I think that my perception of conflict has changed because before I use to always want to be right and I never put myself in the other person’s shoes. After some experience and education, I started to realize that conflict doesn’t lead you to nothing but more problems with that individual.

Conflict Management Styles

        Conflict is classified in five management styles which are competing, collaborating, avoiding, accommodating, and compromising. First, competing is when one individual strives to satisfy their own interest instead of looking out for others because they are trying to compete and be the winner. For example, my friend Lea who is from France was very competitive when it came to planning a trip while being abroad because she always wanted to go somewhere that benefited her not others in our group and most the time we would go where she wanted. Competing would be appropriate to use in sports because the two teams will always try to play better so one can win at the end and be looked as more good. Secondly, collaborating is when a group of people work together to satisfy the interests or concerns of everyone in the group. At a workplace, this would be great to use because you collaborate as a group to divide a task that you are given. An example is when we were planning a weekend trip in Costa Rica we would collaborate as a group to decide what each of us wanted to do and then we would decide the next destination to satisfy everyone in our group. Avoiding is when an individual acknowledges the problem and tries anything to ignore the conflict. An example of this is when the whole group wouldn’t agree with the trip decision, but I will just act like I agreed because I didn’t want to cause more problems. I think avoiding can be used in any type of situation but it can be useful whenever you are in a conflict with a family member or someone from your group and you don’t want to make things worse.  Then accommodating is when a person is willing to put the other individuals interest or plans above their own because they want to satisfy their needs. In my opinion most of the time in Costa Rica I will cancel my plans and accommodate what my friend wanted to do because I will make time another day to do my things. Accommodating would be essential to use in workplace situations if you want to help accomplish the interests of the other person in your group. Finally, compromising is when there is never a winner or loser but they try find a solution even if any parties don’t agree. I personally believe this would be perfect whenever you are given a certain time to arrive home and you try to convince them that later is better and you agree to a time in between to accommodate both individuals. Overall, whenever there were disagreements of the trips we would try to make the best decision because we were not able to satisfy everyone’s need due to the lack of time.