Management Policies and Practices

Management Policies and Practices

November 20 2012

Handling Conflicts

There are different types of personalities in the world. Thus, they all possess different values, expectations, opinions, positions, and interests. Whenever the differences and disputes occur in values, interests, or positions regarding different issues the conflict becomes inevitable. In fact, family is an initial institution or source that builds person's communication style and teaches approaches to handle conflicts. However, within the families conflicts are not always positively handled. As a result, people's conflict style that he or she learned while growing up delivers most of the problems in the process of handling conflicts. Strong disagreement, disputes, or oppositions through which people involved perceive a possible threat to their concerns, needs, or interests is basically what conflicts are ("About Conflict"). It is fact of life that the conflicts will take place in the workplace. There are numerous situations where different needs, goals, and interests of different people lead them in to a conflict. In fact, existence of conflict does not always result in negative outcomes. Moreover, effectively resolved conflict helps people to grow professionally and personally. There are different types of situations that lead to a conflict; however, differences between two parties' interests, needs, expectations, values, and attitudes are the most common situations. Rising conflicts in organizations force people to direct their efforts and energy towards solving interpersonal issues instead of focusing on work accomplishment. People could focus more on their job performance and increase personal productivity if no conflicts took place in the organization. Since conflicts are inevitable, companies should try to successfully resolve them so that they can benefit from positive resolution and solve problems that the conflict has brought to the surface. For instance, successfully resolved conflicts more than often help to increase understanding within the group of workers where people expand their awareness of the situation. Consequently, discussions in resolving conflicts give people a better insight about the ways of achieving personal goals in a way that does not opposite to the goals of others. Additionally, effectively resolved conflict helps to generate mutual respect in the team and helps to build confidence in the team's spirit that the team is able to work together effectively. As a result, by effectively resolving conflict organizations can increase group cohesion. Finally, effectively handled conflict can improve people's self-knowledge as conflicts make people to examine their goals in detail. Thus, examining helps people to understand the most important issues. In its turn understanding things that are the most important to them increases effectiveness and sharpens their focus ("Conflict Resolution"). However, damaging results can deliver the conflict that is not handled effectively. Teamwork can be disrupted as conflicting goals can shift to personal dislikes. Additionally, since teams are distracted from their work and goals, talents of the organization can be wasted as well. Therefore, to avoid recrimination and negativity, companies or management should utilize compatible conflict handling styles that are offered by Thomas and Kilmann ("Conflict Resolution").

Ralph Kilmann and Kenneth Thomas developed five main styles of handling conflict. They asserted that