10.0 Understanding Conflict
Learning Objectives
- Define conflict.
- List the different types of conflict.
- Explain whether conflict is always negative.
Let’s take a closer look at these social issues, such as conflict, to understand how they can derail companies and individuals alike, and what to do to prevent such consequences from happening to you. In this chapter, you’ll see that managing conflict and engaging in effective negotiation are both key for effective organizational behaviour within organizations as well as daily life. Conflicts range from minor annoyances to outright violence. One of the major ways to avoid conflicts escalating to high levels is through understanding the causes of conflict and developing methods for managing potential negative outcomes. Negotiation is one of the most effective ways to decrease conflict and will also be examined in depth in this chapter.
Similar to how conflicts can range from minor to major, negotiations vary in terms of their consequences. A high-stakes negotiation at work might mean the difference between a company’s survival and its demise. On the other end of the spectrum, we deal with minor negotiations on a regular basis, such as negotiating with a coworker about which movie to see. Maybe you make a concession: “OK, we’ll watch what you want, but I get to pick where we eat.” Maybe you hold tough: “I don’t want to watch anything except a comedy.” Perhaps you even look for a third option that would mutually satisfy both parties. Regardless of the level, conflict management and negotiation tactics are important skills that can be learned. First, let’s take a deeper look at conflict.
Conflict is a process that involves people disagreeing. Researchers have noted that conflict is like the common cold. Everyone knows what it is, but understanding its causes and how to treat it is much more challenging (Wall & Callister, 1995). As we noted earlier, conflict can range from minor disagreements to workplace violence. In addition, there are three types of conflict that can arise within organizations. Let’s take a look at each of them in turn.
Intrapersonal Conflict
Intrapersonal conflict arises within a person. For example, when you’re uncertain about what is expected or wanted, or you have a sense of being inadequate to perform a task, you are experiencing intrapersonal conflict. Intrapersonal conflict can arise because of differences in roles. A manager may want to oversee a subordinate’s work, believing that such oversight is a necessary part of the job. The subordinate, on the other hand, may consider such extensive oversight to be micromanagement or evidence of a lack of trust. Role conflict, another type of intrapersonal conflict, includes having two different job descriptions that seem mutually exclusive. This type of conflict can arise if you’re the head of one team but also a member of another team. A third type of intrapersonal conflict involves role ambiguity. Perhaps you’ve been given the task of finding a trainer for a company’s business writing training program. You may feel unsure about what kind of person to hire—a well-known but expensive trainer or a local, unknown but low-priced trainer. If you haven’t been given guidelines about what’s expected, you may be wrestling with several options.
Interpersonal Conflict
Interpersonal conflict is among individuals such as coworkers, a manager and an employee, or GMs/Owners and their staff. Interpersonal conflict often arises because of competition or because of personality or values differences. For example, one person’s style may be to “go with the gut” on decisions, while another person wants to make decisions based on facts. Those differences will lead to conflict if the individuals reach different conclusions. Many golf clubs suffer because of interpersonal conflicts. Keeping conflicts centred around ideas rather than individual differences is important in avoiding conflict escalation.
Intergroup Conflict
Intergroup conflict is conflict that takes place among different groups. Types of groups may include different departments or divisions in a golf business (ie, Pro Shop, Food and Beverage, Turf), employees and management, or competing golf courses that supply the same customers. For example, Golf North Properties or Clublink. Departments may have conflicts over budget allocations; employees and management may disagree over work rules; suppliers may conflict with each other over the quality of products. Merging two groups together can lead to friction between the groups, especially if there are scarce resources to be divided among the groups.
Is Conflict Always Bad?
Most people are uncomfortable with conflict, but is conflict always bad? Conflict can be dysfunctional if it paralyzes an organization, leads to less than optimal performance, or, in the worst case, leads to workplace violence. Surprisingly, a moderate amount of conflict can actually be a healthy (and necessary) part of organizational life (Amason, 1996). To understand how to get to a positive level of conflict, we need to understand its root causes, consequences, and tools to help manage it. The impact of too much or too little conflict can disrupt performance. If conflict is too low, then performance is low. If conflict is too high, then performance also tends to be low. The goal is to hold conflict levels in the middle of this range. While it might seem strange to want a particular level of conflict, a medium level of task-related conflict is often viewed as optimal because it represents a situation in which a healthy debate of ideas takes place.
Task conflict can be good in certain circumstances, such as in the early stages of decision making, because it stimulates creativity. However, it can interfere with complex tasks in the long run (De Dreu & Weingart, 2003). Personal conflicts, such as personal attacks, are never healthy because they cause stress and distress, which undermines performance. The worst cases of personal conflicts can lead to workplace bullying. At some clubs, all new employees go through a training module to learn “constructive confrontation.” The content of the training program includes dealing with others in a positive manner, using facts rather than opinions to persuade others, and focusing on the problem at hand rather than the people involved. (Dahle, 2001). Research focusing on effective teams across time found that they were characterized by low but increasing levels of process conflict (how do we get things done?), low levels of relationship conflict with a rise toward the end of the project (personal disagreements among team members), and moderate levels of task conflict in the middle of the task timeline (Jehn & Mannix, 2001).
Exercises
- What are the types of conflicts that individuals may have at work? Which type have you experienced the most?
- What are some primary causes of conflict at work?
- Explain how miscommunication might be related to a conflict at work.
“10.2: Understanding Conflict” from Organizational Behavior by LibreTexts is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
