Conflict Resolution

Conflict Resolution

It's a fact of life that there will always be some type of conflict in the workplace because there are people with diverse backgrounds, they have different goals, and they have a certain way that they want things to be; therefore animosity and resentfulness will come up, but conflict doesn't always have to be considered a bad experience. If it is handled and resolved effectively, it is a strong possibility that it can promote personal and professional growth or it can result in a negative outcome. Many problems can be solved and some underlying issues can be addressed during the resolution of the conflict, but it can also be damaging if it is not handled effectively. Managers are expected to be able to resolve workplace disagreements and oppositions, whether it involves an employee or a customer, in order to keep their teams and organizations working effectively.

There are two types of conflicts: functional and dysfunctional. Functional conflict is a confrontation or disagreement between two people or more which can bring about awareness of new ideas, growth, and mutual understandings. The disagreements can be worked through, issues can be resolved, tensions are released, and morale can be improved under functional conflict. Upon resolution, this type of conflict can also become a positive change for the company by bringing out creativity among all parties involved, it can translate into increased productivity and also inspire people to thinking of new, innovative ways to approach problems. On the other hand, dysfunctional conflict is not conducive to growth and mutual understandings; it can lead to stress because it is destructive in nature, it emotionally overloads the parties involved due to personalized anger and resentment. Involvement in a dysfunctional conflict is not based on solving an issue; it can consist on personal threats, deception, and abusive language toward others which can lead to a dangerous situation due to the negative reaction, aggressive acts, or retaliation (Nelson & Quick, 2011).

Conflicts may arise due to different types of activities that intercept the balance of needs and interests of people such as incompatibility of behavior, the differences in attitudes and values, and preferences in joint activities social affiliation. There are two types of conflicts in the workplace can be structural or personal. Structural conflict includes jobs that are considered specialized whereas people are blind to the tasks that others perform, jobs that are interdependent where individuals find it easy to shift blame on one another, when resources that are shared becomes scarce, when goals are incompatible, when boss have personal relationships with employees, when bosses seem to have more privileges than the employees, and when jurisdictional ambiguity exists where clarity of responsibly is unknown ( Nelson & Quick, 2011).

Then there are personal factors that can derive from several antecedents; individual differences whereas attitudes, opinions, background culture, maturity, education level, gender, language, etc., are factors in which personal confrontations can arise. Then there are interpersonal issues where decent behavior and respect is expected from everyone and when it is not shown, negative responses can develop between the employee and the manager or between managers. It is more difficult to deal with manager who are experiencing a conflict because the result can cause poor performance within the group by the managers always disagreeing on important issues which minimizes their face-to-face communications that further results in lack of trust, regressive tactics, withholding information, and non-cooperation. There are also organizational factors such as bureaucracy, departmentalization, perceived organizational injustice, harassment and sexual abuse which are all potential antecedents of workplace conflicts. Issues that are not based within the organization can