november 18th

Conflict occurs in every aspect of everyone’s life; whether it is with family, friends, work, social institutions such as churches or shopping malls, conflict is here to stay! The important thing is not how many conflicts you have, but how you resolve them. The way I deal with conflict depends on my power over the situation. For example when I have conflicts with friends or siblings, I am more likely to use a forceful style in which I may try to win at someone’s expense. If, however, I have a conflict with a professor or a parent, I am more likely to use an accommodating or avoiding style. The former referring to me giving in to others, and not paying attention to my own interests, and the latter referring to avoiding conflict altogether.

In order to improve my conflict resolution skills when working in a team, for example, I should make sure that all rules and procedures are clarified before hand so that misunderstandings are reduced. I should also reduce interdependence among group members, which may be hard when completing an assignment together, but if I am aware prior to the assignment that I will be working with people who I find hard to cooperate with, I should perhaps take on more work that is independent, and less work that requires me to work with others. If the technique mentioned previously does not work, I should try to improve communication with the rest of my group members by talking our differences out in a mature manner. Another technique, which I have used in our MGM300 career project group, was reducing differentiation. As I mentioned in my previous blog, we all went out for dinner and found that we have common backgrounds and experiences; for example we are all interested in accounting! I think another really important technique that is used more often than we think is emphasizing superordinate goals, in which all members agree on common objectives that are more important than individual differences and or goals; this in turn helps to reduce the problems group members have with each other as they are focused on getting the task done. For example, in university everyone is concerned with marks, and it is everyone’s common goal to get a good mark, this is a superordinate goal. Conflict arises, however, when people have differing definitions of what a good mark is; for example good mark to me is anything above an 80, but to others it is anything above a 60 or a 70, and for some it may be anything that is a passing grade! To solve this problem, I would need to use one of the other techniques mentioned above such as improving communication and understanding in which I may ask all group members to write on a piece of paper what mark they hope to obtain in the assignment, and then communicating an average of all the desired marks, so people are more clear on how much effort is needed for the assignment.

The case scenario given in the blog jog was “If I was a manager and two of my direct reports were arguing over who had lead responsibility for a project I just assigned to them, what would I do?”

I would improve communication and understanding by clarifying the fact that no one has a lead responsibility over the assignment, and the two individuals are expected to work together. To help the two get started, I would help them to clarify the work that needs to be done, and help them make a checklist of all the tasks, and then I would tell them to divide the work up evenly and create deadlines for each component to ensure that everything is done on time. Finally, I would encourage (NOT force) the two individuals to go for lunch so that they can get to know each other better, and see if they have common backgrounds and experiences which will help them to collaborate more effectively. Some drawbacks of this approach is that maybe by going out for lunch the two will not find any common ground, and will dislike one another even more. In addition, by not assigning someone to be the leader, both individuals may slack off on the project as there is no one keeping track of who is doing what.