Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay
It is an organizational function to ensure quality production of services to meet clients needs. To achieve the end product, this is customer satisfaction each department must collaborate to play their part in ensuring they deliver the best. However, challenges must be there such as organizational conflict which destroys collaborations between employees and clients. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.Therefore, it is a managerial duty to address conflicts to enhance collaboration which in turn ensures quality service.
For conflict to be solved, the involved parties have to accept they are in disagreement to establish the source of difference to devise a way to resolve the dispute. The managers should try and resolve the dispute for it to be an asset more than a liability so that it may bring understanding between the disagreeing parties. The rivals must have self-control for them to control their anger to allow discussion and make a decision as per the conflict.
A company should devise a common way to solve conflicts in case they occur. Pressure might result from unsatisfied customers who may damage the client and company’s relation. Assuming the interests of customers or living it up to employees to solve them may reduce sales thereby affecting the business.Therefore, a firm has to have a common way of addressing the issues when they arise instead of assuming them. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
The company management should also try and reduce the conflicts by training the employees to solve them on their own. Through this, the employees get to know how to deal with arising issues. A company should give incentives to those who have successful solved their conflict so as to encourage people to beresponsible and reduce conflict for the realization of better profits.
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From this perspective, conflict occurs as a result of malfunctioning individuals or organizations. Therefore, in order to resolve conflict, problems must be identified, causes must be analyzed, and those people or situations contributing to the conflict must be “fixed” (Kilmann & Thomas, 1978). This mechanistic view approaches conflict resolution as a logical, linear process. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.Robbins comments: “Although research studies now provide strong evidence to dispute that this approach to conflict reduction results in high group performance, many still evaluate conflict situations utilizing this outmoded standard” (2001, p. 384). In the 1950s the emerging human relations view of conflict began to replace the earlier traditional view. The human relations position suggests that conflict is a natural phenomenon in groups and organizations. Therefore, since it is inevitable, it must be accepted and managed. During this era, the management literature introduced the term conflict management (Nurmi & Darling, 1997); and, by the 1970s, the field of organization development, with its tool-kit of team-building interventions, began to go mainstream, thus providing organizations with new resources for dealing with conflict. Conflict 4 More recently, a third conflict school of thought has emerged, referred to as the interactionist view. This perspective
The inevitability of conflicts within an organisation suggests that organisational leaders need to embrace it rather than avoid it. Thus, although there are many ways of dealing with conflicts at workplaces such as collaboration, compromise, competing, avoidance, and accommodation, any strategy that emphasises leaving conflicts unaddressed is inappropriate.
Conflicts often produce a negative implication on the performance of an organisation (Bagshaw, 2004). Since the principal goal of organisational leadership is to look for mechanisms of resolving challenges, which may hinder the performance of an organisation so that it delivers value to its owners (shareholders), conflict avoidance constitutes a risky approach to conflict management.
Organisations comprise people from different cultural, professional, racial, age, and other demographic backgrounds. Where people are segregated along these diversity differences, cultural conflicts arise. This suggests managers and leaders within organisations encounter immense challenges in a bid to seek effective strategies of recruitment, training, developing, and retaining the most talented personnel in an organisation that is characterised by immense workforce diversities.
These challenges become even more pronounced as many organisations endeavour to engage in global businesses as a measure of increasing their competitive advantage. The more the diversity of the workforce, the higher the risks of workplace conflicts that are associated with diversity differences. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. However, upon adoption of effective strategies of handling this diversity, organisations gain from higher workforce innovative and creativity potential.
Theoretical Background
Defining Workplace Conflicts
In a healthy organisation, conflicts are predictable. Workplaces bring people from different cultural backgrounds. Such people have different opinions and views towards various issues that are encountered in the daily activities of an organisation. Such different opinions and views create points of parity and disparity. The disparities lead to conflicts. Bacal (1998, p. 8) defines workplace conflict as “issues that generate frequent expressions of emotions, frustration, and anger”.
This suggests that whenever two or more people work together, they disagree on strategies for accomplishing some desired outcomes. Such disagreements can be either constructive or destructive in an organisation. In fact, Bacal (1998) refers destructive conflicts as ugly clashes while constructive disagreements are good organisational conflicts. While it is impossible to eliminate workplace conflicts, destructive conflicts are highly undesirable. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. They should be kept at minimal levels.
Organisations, individuals, and even work teams require constructive conflict for them to grow. By engaging in opposing discussions, especially on mechanisms of accomplishing certain outcomes, opportunities are created for “thinking and doing things that can be useful to everyone” (Bacal, 1998, p.8).
In this sense, the outcomes of decisions made following engagements in constructive conflicts are in favour and accommodative of all key stakeholders’ interests within an organisation. Destructive conflicts make people in an organisation uncomfortable.
In some situations, escalated conflicts have the implication of compelling people to quit (Bagshaw, 2004). Organisations that experience destructive conflicts also encounter challenges of “…lower morale, lower productivity, higher turnover, and more employee burnout” (Bacal, 1998, p.8). This suggests that organisational leaders and managers should focus on eliminating destructive conflicts while encouraging constructive conflicts in the effort to build higher performing organisations.
Causes of Conflicts in the Workplace
Workplace conflicts are broadly subdivided into caustic and productive conflicts. Destructive conflicts often involve personality clashes. This occurs when people fail to get along with one another. This type of conflict in the workplace is often fuelled by emotion and perceptions about somebody else’s motives and character. For example, a team leader jumps on someone for being late because he or she views the team member as being lazy and disrespectful.
The team member sees the team leader as out to ‘get’ him or her because he or she is not one of the ‘favoured children’. The second type occurs when people view decisions and ideas articulated to a given job or tasks differently. Conflicting ideas become productive in the event that parties in conflicts have the willingness to engage in brainstorming sessions (Bacal, 1998). In such situations, compromised ideas are at times better in enhancing the success of an organisation compared to an original idea.
As a cause of workplace conflicts as hinted above, personality clashes initiate with disputes regarding certain business practices, which then skyrocket into mutual loathing (Collinsin & Rourke, 2005). In some cases, two people may not like each other right from the beginning due to diversity differences and other personality differences.
This claim implies that workplace diversity may be a big contributor to conflicts within an organisation. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. Personality clashes also contribute to workplace disputes, which may escalate to become conflicts since people possess different beliefs, values, and approaches to handling problems. When people fail or have difficulties in appreciating and embracing other people’s work methods, clashes emerge.
Some conflicts within an organisation can emerge due to lack of trust for the HR to handle differences between two disagreeing employees. The situation makes the parties engaged in conflict expand their differences when permitted to take matters in their hands. Therefore, HRM deserves to evaluate the circumstances that may cause disregard to the consideration of the roles of HRM in conflict resolution by employees.
Gramberg (2005, p. 94) supports this position by further claiming, “interpersonal skills are important to managers with regard to building workplace trust and cooperation from staff members who are collectively accountable for furthering business goals”. In fact, one of the roles of management in an organisation is to ensure peaceful environment that is characterised by workforce collaboration in the effort to meet the goals, mission, and aims of an organisation.
Failure of employee collaboration may give rise to workplace conflicts. Other causes of conflicts within workplaces include poor or inadequate communication, which gives rise to misunderstandings, limited organisational resources, which lead to competition and conflicting needs. Poor performance in tasks that are allocated to employees may also lead to conflicts when some tasks with higher effort input demands or when poorly completed tasks are re-allocated to other employees.
Globalised organisations embrace diversity in their workforce. This strategic initiative is impaired by the belief that employing people from diverse backgrounds gives an organisation a competitive advantage. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. For instance, an organisation develops the capacity to tap and benefit from a wide range of talents and knowledge bases (Johnson & Keddy, 2010). This means that an organisation is able to innovate and create a wide range of products, which while traded in the global markets translate into increased profitability.
Focusing on diversity as a strategic initiative for an organisation delivers gains in terms of enhanced growth through increment of products range due to innovation that is brought by people possessing different capabilities working together. However, it is crucial to note that diversity also brings together people from different cultural backgrounds (Gramberg, 2005).
The above assertion implies that diversity has the impact of creating cultural conflicts in workplaces. Institute of Leadership and Management (2007) confirms how the HRM is important in resolving such conflicts since it helps to create a common organisational culture by helping employees understand that different people have different abilities and beliefs and that these differences should not be permitted to influence the way people relate with one another.
Alternatively, diversity differences need not to lead to personality clashes within workplaces. The HR, being charged with the roles of ensuring that employees work in harmony without conflicting situations that lead to personality clashes, should deploy diversity to enhance the success by treating any conflict arising from cultural differences frictions as an act of indiscipline and negligence to comply with an established organisational culture.Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
While this role may be well established in the outline of the mandates of the HRM in an organisation, communication of may hinder the success of the initiatives deployed by HR to curb personality conflicts.
Studies by Bacal (1998) and Lee (2008) identify communication as a major cause of workplace conflicts. Leaders for dynamic organisations appreciate the importance of effective communication, particularly while working in an environment of consistent change.
Communication has the ability to deliver tangible products as opposed to being a soft component of the leadership roles. Improving satisfaction of consumers, enhancing the quality for service delivery and products quality, and enhancing retention together with satisfaction of employees, are all dependent on effective communication (Lee, 2008). These aspects also constitute the ingredients of workplace conflicts.
In an organisation that employs people from diverse backgrounds, communication is the tool deployed to harness individual differences of employees in an effort to align them to a common organisational culture that is guided by aims, missions, goals, and objectives of the organisation (Johnson & Keddy 2010). This suggests that communication is also important in effective resolution of employee conflicts. Conflicts influence employee productivity. Hence, performance of an organisation is also affected negatively.
Poor communication often results in resistance to change, especially where the persons working in an organisation consider the changes being implemented as threats to their jobs and personal excellence.
For instance, while personnel at the headquarters of an organisation may be fighting for standardisation of products produced by an organisation to ease supply chain and logistics challenges, workers at departmental levels of various products may be opposed to such an endeavour. This disparity creates destructive workplace conflicts between an organisation and employees at different hierarchical levels.
Inadequate communication at the intra-organisational levels may result in different perceptions of ideas and strategies that will enhance organisational success in the market (Bacal, 1998). Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. This claim implies that conflicts in ideology minimise the opportunities for channelling organisational energy to the implementation of ideas and strategies that will enhance the increment of productivity of an organisation
Communicating both adequately and effectively is crucial for elimination of workplace conflicts. Institute of Leadership and Management (2007) confirms that the availability of adequate and unambiguous information helps employees to collectively support effectively while doing what is within their capacity to ensure that an organisation succeeds in the direction set by leaders and managers.
In this sense, the goal of an effective communication programme within an organisation is to foster change of employees’ behaviours and perception towards other employees who may trigger personality clashes.
Effecting the desired change in an organisation through communication takes different forms. It may involve harmonisation of people’s attitudes or alteration of work processes in the effort to support organisation’s success by eliminating clash of ideas in the manner of executing various job elements, which may be destructive.
Effective communication entails the communication of strategies of success through translation of the essential business objectives and goals into terms that employees can understand easily (Johnson & Keddy, 2010).
In response to such communication, employees become engaged and aligned in readiness to work collectively towards driving organisational success. In fact, when communication fails, misunderstanding arises resulting in the failure of employees to execute tasks as desired by managers and leaders. This translates into workplace conflicts between managers, supervisors, and leaders with employees. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
Impacts of Workplace Conflict
The human resource arm of an organisation has an immense responsibility to ensure that top talent within an organisation is retained. HRM is the core competency for an organisation whose objective is to handle issues that are related to employees.
Such issues include enhancing motivation, enhancing job satisfaction, laying remuneration structures, giving advice on promotions, and aiding an organisation to acquire top talent through the selection and recruitment. Addressing issues that result in poor performance of employees such as poor job satisfaction call for the HRM to establish correlations for the challenges. Lee (2008) identifies ugly workplace conflicts as one of the correlate of poor job satisfaction.
As a core competency for an organisation, HRM engages in tasks such as training and development and managing conflicts within organisations through conflict resolution. Conflicts that HRM enhances their management are between an organisation and employees or between employees and other employees. These conflicts produce both positive and negative impacts on an organisation.
Conflicts may have the impact of creating opportunities for organisational growth. Bacal (1998) supports this impact by adding that a good organisational conflict entails providing the means for learning together with setting mechanisms for fostering cooperation among employees.
Collins and Rourke (2005) maintain that conflicts may create an opportunity for employees to learn strategies for effectively handling similar conflicts in the future.
While workplace conflicts may emanate from poor communication, conflicts can provide a means through which people become aware and/or understand the various issues that may translate into future conflicts.
Through this understanding, people are able to develop honesty and transparent organisational communication channels (Lee, 2008). Different ideas and angles of view on a given issue that may be influencing an organisation have the impact of creating well brainstormed ideas, which aid an organisation to achieve better performance levels.
Organisational performance is a function of many variables. Some of these variables are workforce morale, employee turnover rates, productivity, and employee burnout. Bacal (1998) confirms that these variables correlate directly with workplace conflicts.
As revealed before, one of the common causes of workplace conflicts is workforce diversity especially in terms of professional capabilities and cultural differences. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. This assertion implies that effective management of workforce diversity has the ability to improve workforce productivity, enhance improvement of workforce engagement, and to foster the reduction of staff absenteeism and workforce turnover.
HRM plays central roles in handling all issues influencing negatively the productivity of employees in a workplace. In case of ugly conflicts, diversity has the implication of leading to conflicts, which impair the productivity of employees by lowering their work morale. However, in case of good organisational conflicts arising from diversity differences, an organisation will benefit.
Google provides an important benchmark on how positive conflicts of workforce diversity can enhance the performance of an organisation. Google Company gains from the varied viewpoints of its diverse workforce in effect that such a workforce provides increased problem-solving capacities together with enhanced creativity levels.
In this context, it is inferable that proper management of good organisational conflicts that involve exchange and disagreement on various ideas akin to diversity differences in terms of talent and creativity levels has positive impacts. For instance, creativity and innovativeness of a diverse workforce has made Google gain via establishing a central position in the competitive market.
The goal for managing workforce conflicts is to ensure that conflicts do not produce negative impacts on the success of organisations. Labour turnover constitutes one of the negative impacts of workplace conflicts. In many organisations, labour turnover is deployed as a measure of performance. It measures the decisions of the worker to remain committed to the work of an organisation (Bacal, 1998). Employee turnover is divided into two main types: voluntary and involuntary turnover.
Voluntary turnover occurs when employees decide to quit from employment out of their own will to engage in other activities such as self-employment, but not because the job was dissatisfying. In case of involuntary turnover, people are compelled by circumstances to quit from their employment. Such circumstances include poor pay, perception of exploitation, conflicts with other employees, and work-personal life conflicts among other reasons. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
Labour turnover is controllable or unavoidable in some situations. For instance, where labour turnover is caused by workplace conflicts, proper management of such conflicts can control and avoid it. Where this does not happen, the impacts of labour turnover due to destructive workplace conflicts have serious consequences on the performance of an organisation both in short and in the long-term.
McClure (2004) contends that high turnover in organisations leads to increased costs of recruitment together with training of new employees to fill the gap left by the outgoing employees. Turnover is one of the issues that organisations seeking to exploit cost competitiveness as a strategy of success should address proactively. Addressing it proactively calls for organisations to deal with its causation such as workplace conflicts.
The best approach of management of organisational conflicts encompasses developing strategies for its prevention (Wisinski, 2003). However, occurrence of conflicts acts the indicator of potential problems that have negative impacts on the productivity of employees such as low motivation.
They also create opportunities for establishing good relationships among work teams and individuals when arbitration, mediation, and reconciliation efforts succeed. Considering that good relationship among employees is the foundation for higher work team productivity, mild destructive workplace conflicts in this sense can help build better performing work teams.
Handling Conflicts in the Workplace
In practice, employees are not able to handle misunderstandings with their peers in an effective way before such misunderstandings have translated to personality clashes. Realisation of this argument calls for the management to step in to look for mechanisms of handling conflicts (Myatt, 2012; Cloke & Goldsmith, 2005).
One of such mechanisms is the adoption of disciplinary measures for employees engaging in unproductive conflicts. However, before a disciplinary action is adopted, intra-communication and inter-communication strategies are vital.
This move calls for HR manager to possess good interpersonal and intrapersonal communication skills. “These skills are deployed to help in harnessing employees’ personal and social skills that are necessary for conflict resolution” (Masters & Albright, 2002, p.117).
Indeed, interpersonal communication comprises an essential skill in conflict management within an organisation in the effort to diffuse various stressful environments together with hostile situations, which may create fertile grounds for the development of conflicts (Myatt, 2012, para.8). Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
In organisational settings, the emergence of conflicts is hard to prevent. According to Gramberg (2005), the main challenge is on how to resolve workplace conflicts. In the effort to reduce incidences of defiant behaviours, effective management of employees entails communicating effectively the rules and procedures of punishing employees in case of breach of the established rules and regulations that define the codes of ethics and organisational culture.
Since any grievances and disciplinary actions within an organisation begin with a clear and precise communication of the implications of an employee’s acts of misconduct, interpersonal and intrapersonal communication skills are an important requirement for a manager who endeavours to prepare, conduct, and conclude grievance and disciplinary cases effectively.
Scholars have developed many models to describe various mechanisms of resolving conflicts within an organisation. One of such models was proposed by Thomas-Kilmann. According to his model, conflicts can be handled using five main styles, namely accommodating, shunning, working together, rivalry, and compromising.
Accommodation involves the decision by an organisation to cooperate with parties in conflict in the highest possible degree. Often, one party works against its desired goals and/or outcomes. The strategy works well when one party in conflict has a better solution to a given problem (Masters & Albright, 2002). It helps in building strong ties between two or more parties in conflict.
Alternatively, one may choose to ignore the need to resolve a given conflict. This approach entails resolution of conflicts via avoiding it. This style works well when the effective solution is costly or when one perceives that he or she has minimal probabilities for winning, or when an issue in conflict is trivial. However, avoiding is not an effective strategy in the long-term (Bagshaw, 2004: Bacal, 1998).
Collaboration includes partnering to follow a goal that is pursued by another party. During collaboration, effort is made to accommodate all people’s ideas for synthesis in the attempt to develop a single superior idea for resolution of a conflict.
Such an idea also needs to take into consideration all points of agreement and disagreement between the collaborating parties (Bagshaw, 2004). This way, it becomes possible to break away from the win-lose strategy to explore the win-win strategy. This approach requires an incredibly high capacity to trust one another in the development of a superior idea for resolution of a conflict.
The approach is opposed to the competing technique in which the focus is on the win-lose approach to conflict resolution (Gramberg, 2005). Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. Competing approaches work well in times of dire need to make quick decisions. In the case of compromising, parties in conflict focus on lose-lose strategy. The approach is best suited whenever parties in conflict pursue goals and objectives, which have no probability of converging.
Lee (2008) asserts that managers should engage in communication with employees and other organisational stakeholders for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is attributed to the expensiveness of ineffective communication in an organisation. In the modern workplaces, the roles of communication in management are important since workplace environments continue to be sophisticated.
They also involve complex interaction processes among all individual units that make the whole organisation. Consequently, collaboration capability enables an organisation to gain from creative diverse workforce that requires ardent and unambiguous communication (Lee, 2008). This way, it becomes possible to handle workplace conflicts that are attributed to poor and inadequate communication.
Upon establishing the issues that attract conflicts between various employees and/or an organisation, the focus shifts to establishing mechanisms of healing the wounds caused by a conflict.
In this process, Gramberg (2005) identifies reconciliation, arbitration, and mediation as important techniques of handling workplace conflicts. Reconciliation involves admission of wrongdoing followed by forgiveness. Mediation involves bringing two parties in conflict together through a third party by re-visiting the series of events or disputes that led to the conflict.
This step is then followed by suggesting codes of behaviour or reactions that should have prevented the conflict. In each case, the parties in conflict identify their own mistakes and put effort to ensure they would not repeat the same mistakes in the future workplace interaction processes (Gramberg, 2005). Arbitration through a third nonpartisan party including a court becomes important where conflicts have translated to personal injuries and/or paying of damages is necessary. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
Nature and Solutions of Workplace Conflicts
From the discussions in the literature review section, workplace conflicts have both negative and positive impacts. Even ugly conflicts may also have some aspects of positive impacts if managed effectively. Managing workplace conflicts requires the deployment of various techniques and approaches. From Thomas-Kilmann model for conflict management, the techniques involve avoiding, challenging, teamwork, negotiation, and accommodation.
In the context of the Gramberg (2005), arbitration, reconciliation, and mediation can suffice as solutions to workplace conflicts. The appropriateness of each of these solutions depends on the cause of conflicts encountered by an organisation and the desired outcomes. For instance, organisations seeking to have motivated workforce in a bid to enhance their productivity in the long-term will seek solutions that have long-term outcomes in the resolution of employee conflicts.
Based on literature review, one of the causes of conflicts in the workplace is the allocation of tasks that are impartially done by poorly performing employees to higher performing employees after they (higher performing employees) have completed their allocated work. A possible solution to this challenge encompasses the deployment of performance-based pay systems.
Performance-based reimbursement is a system of payment in which people are rewarded or paid equivalently to their amount of work or output. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. A good example of this mechanism of payment is the payment of salespeople on commission depending on the amount of sales made. Another potential cause of conflicts in an organisation is personality clashes. A possible solution involves employing people with diverse personality traits.
When a conflict occurs, accepting it as the status quo followed by its avoidance may be a possible response to workplace conflicts with the anticipation that the conflict will fade (Collinsin & Rourke, 2005). Alternatively, parties in conflicts can work collaboratively to establish a common ground of mutual benefit. In some cases, this approach can fail to work, with parties resorting to compromising, accommodation, or competing.
Competing calls for parties to engage in a dialogue such that the best party emerges the winner. The losing party follows the directive issued by the winner. This alternative opposes the compromising option, which advocates for parties in conflict to consider acquiring little gains and/or incur some losses in the effort to establish a middle ground. People wishing to embrace accommodation as an alternative to resolution of conflicts surrender their demand and needs in the quest to please another party (Gramberg, 2005).
In these five alternatives, parties in conflict may engage in dialogue voluntarily without mediation from a third non-partisan party. Bringing parties in conflict into agreement may also call for arbitration. In situations where one party admits wrongdoing, reconciliation becomes an important alternative to the solution of workplace conflicts.
Diversity constitutes a major cause of conflicts within an organisation. It refers to the myriads of differences existing among people working in an organisation with regard to parameters such as gender, race, community values, age, sexual affection, income levels, work experience, parental status, religious beliefs, ethnicity, religion, and physical abilities among others. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
Where organisational culture reinforces the significance of diversity difference in contributing and explaining workplace behaviours, performance levels, stigmatisation of abilities of various people, and stereotyping of people from a given cultural background, ugly conflicts are inevitable. A solution to this challenge is developing an organisational culture that embraces difference amongst the workforce in line with the goals, objectives, and mission of an organisation.
Tackling Conflict: Conflict Management Styles, Implication of Conflict Management Styles, and the Relationship between Conflict Management and Job Satisfaction
Traditionally, many organisations were managed hierarchically through a bureaucratic system in which pay level was a function of the position of an employee in the hierarchy of management. Adopting a performance based pay system in such organisations entails adopting organisational change. Unfortunately, people are generally resistant to change especially when the desired change influences them negatively.
Performance-based payment system encompasses one of the changes that may face hefty criticisms from employees particularly those in senior levels in the hierarchical management protocol. Senior employees whose payment needs adjustment to meet their performance levels are most likely to object the system when a subordinate who records high performance level earns higher incomes than they do.
On the other hand, the subordinates will embrace the change. Consequently, implementing performance-based pay systems within an organisation may create conflicts between employees and their line managers and supervisors. Additionally, in the effort to earn higher pays, employees may work in unsafe speeds. This situation is undesired. Thus, this solution is inappropriate since it may introduce other conflicts.
An alternative of implementing performance pay systems involves seeking to resolve workplace conflicts related to personality clashes through employing people of assorted personality traits. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.While this strategy has the merits of ensuring that people with similar personalities work under similar work environment, in large work teams, it becomes hard to find enough people possessing exactly similar personality traits.
For effectiveness in performance of a work team, diversity in personality traits may also be important especially where an organisation intends to create a work team that engages in constructive conflicts in the effort to enhance brainstorming of ideas. Consequently, this solution is inappropriate since some levels of disagreements in decision-making processes and manner of contextualisation of issues are important in developing the most effective strategies for enhancing organisational performance.
Parties in workplace engage in conflicts due to different opinions. This implies that seeking to compel conflicting people to establish a compromise, accommodation, or collaboration, attracts some challenges since none of the parties would be willing to sacrifice his or her self-esteem. Competing is perhaps the best approach for ensuring that a superior party in a conflict wins.
This boosts the self-esteem of the winner, but immensely destroys the self-image of the loser. In the case where conflicts involve issues that are directly related to work, the loser suffers low job morale, which may affect his or her satisfaction with the job. This may lead to an intention of turnover or even lead to the actual turnover. The converse of this claim is true for the winning party.
From an organisational dimension, the goal is to enhance motivation and commitment of all employees in their work commitment. In overall, this suggests that the organisation will have lost by deploying competing styles for workplace conflict management. Although the conflicts may be resolved, collaboration may also have similar impacts, just like competition since one party must surrender to the demands of another party. Avoidance is the most inappropriate alternative.
Diversity management, as an approach to resolution of workplace conflicts, implies that strategies for managing workforce diversity cuts across different causation elements for conflicts in workplaces.Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. Thus, it can help in the elimination of conflicts that are associated with different level of expertise, thus leading to low performance by some employees that will necessitate the incorporation of performance pay-based systems while addressing the issues of personality differences, which may create personality clashes.
It also rhymes well with the concerns of mediation, reconciliation, and arbitration since conflicts that require these mechanisms of conflict resolution are akin to differences among individuals. Diversity management is the most preferred approach in management of workplace conflicts in globalised organisations.
Recommendations
There are different approaches to solving conflicts. The article recommends proactive passive approach as opposed to a reactive approach. The recommended proactive passive approach is the one, which emphasises handling the causation of conflicts in workplaces effectively. Mediation, arbitration, and reconciliation are reactive since they are deployed after a conflict has already occurred and having already caused damage to an organisation.
Avoiding, competing, collaboration, compromising, and accommodating are equally reactive approaches. Adoption of performance-based pay systems is a recommendable approach to management of conflicts that are associated with poor performance among some employees. However, they can create more problems and conflicts in the end. Thus, the approach is unsuitable.
The best approach that is recommended to the management of workplace conflicts entails understanding the benefits of adopting multicultural environment that is tolerant to workforce diversities. By accomplishing this strategy, organisations would gain immensely in the form of increased productivity of the diverse workforce, hence boosting the profitability of the organisation in question.
Incorporating this recommendation requires all management staff members, right from top to down, to understand the relevance of workforce diversity from moral and business perspectives. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay. Another way of incorporating the recommendation is by altering organisational values to orient people to commit themselves to the promotion of workforce diversity within the work environment.
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A third way of incorporating the recommendation involves the creation of awareness and/or skills that focus on diversity training. This strategy needs to be implemented by managers of organisations in the quest to ensure that workforce socialisation is directly congruent with the adopted new values.
In turn, it can create increased understanding among people from diverse cultural backgrounds and increased group cohesion. It can also foster improvement of self-knowledge. When employees embrace diversity and diversity needs of all their work team members, they can examine their objectives with care. Through this path, they can understand what is most important to them, thus improving their focus and enhancing their efficiency. This strategy is an essential catalyst for job satisfaction.
Conclusion
Conflict is inevitable in the workplace. It is a reality in every work environment by bringing people from diverse backgrounds together. While people continue to work in teams while caring about the manner they are treated by their work team members, disagreements will always arise to create conflicts in the workplaces.
Conflicts refer to the various issues emerging in the workplace that create emotions such as anger, discontent, and frustration. Such emotions produce either positive impacts or negative impacts to an organisation. For instance, positive impacts may encompass the provision for an opportunity for organisational growth. Negative impacts involve issues such as the reduction of employee motivation, turnover, low job satisfaction, and reduced employees productivity. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.
Reference List
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Cloke, K., & Goldsmith, J. (2005). Resolving Conflicts at Work: Eight Strategies for Everyone on the Job (Rev. ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Collins, D., & Rourke, S. (2005). Managing Conflict and Workplace Relationships. Ohio: Mason.
Gramberg, B. (2005). Managing Workplace Conflict: Alternative Dispute Resolution in Australia. Annandale, N.S. W.: Federation Press.
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Lee, E. (2008). Communication Network Approaches to Conflict Management at the Workplace and Job Satisfaction. London: Lexis Nexis. Challenges In Organizational Conflict Solving Essay.