According to James and Schellenberg (1996), Conflict can be defined as the opposition between individuals and groups on the basis of competing interests, different identities, and/or different attitudes. Conflicts may arise from various sources namely personality differences, poorly managed systems, lack of leadership qualities and poor communication between managers and team members.
For a conflict, it's important to determine whether it's a good or bad conflict because it will have both positive and negative effects on a team. Positive effects helps the team to operate better with more creativity and performance by increasing employees knowledge and skills at the same time negative effects on the management by creating negative emotions and stress, diverting attention in performing tasks and achieving goals.
Conflicts can be productive and unproductive depending on how the management team resolves it. Productive conflicts are about issues, ideas and goals. This can be achieved in a co-operative manner. Whereas unproductive deals with emotions and personalities, in this conflict issue is resolved by teams dominating each other and they will not focus in solving the problems co-operatively.
In an organization unproductive conflicts resolving issues depends on both teams personalities, social relations and the situation and one has to recognize their differences before they move towards resolution of a specific conflict. Four different approaches in resolving a conflict resolution
• Collaboration - In a team when the members of a conflict have important concerns, the team needs to search for solutions that satisfies everyone. This will acquire co-cooperativeness and respect between each other.
• Power Management - In this opposite teams may act aggressively trying to dominate, here rather than concentrating on issue resolution they will focus more on dominating each other. In this management a conflict issue can be resolved by clarifying priorities. If both the groups are willing to confront issues and discuss ideas critically without taking it personally.
• Process Management - In this evidences show that some conflicts are resolved but in most of the cases rather than giving importance in effective group decision making, people often resist discussion. Many times groups encounter in discussion and they become lost, disorganized, frustrated.
• Safe Environment - In Power and Process Management scenario's a safe environment was not established if establishes would ensured participants that personal attacks would not occur. In this, we would invite the group to collaborate on settling up issues with some communication guidelines which would encourage constructive and respectful interaction. Problem in this case, some people would hesitate but later stick to meeting rules and communication guidelines
Of all the above methods, I would prefer Collaborative method for resolving a conflict issue because although all these approaches can be used to resolve a conflict, Confronting issues, Creating rules, dominance on each other may resolve the conflict up to some extent but later teams using these methods often face trouble implementing decisions and facing the issues later. According to Stone, Patton and Heen (1999), "In this management, all the parties all treated equally because when a person is given a high importance mistrust develops and destroys the whole system". In Collaborative method, team members will look for an alternative solution, even though this is time consuming process, at the end of the day it will yield optimal results. It encourages creativity, enhances relationship among team members and increasing their commitment in decision making. and also conflict becomes more productive when all the teams are willing and able to openly accept each other's intentions and acknowledge negative impacts pointed out by others. Participants involved in a conflict will develop a trust among others which will lead them to work together to resolve set of issues.
References:
Littlejohn, S. W., & Domenici, K. (2007). Communication, conflict, and the management of difference. Long Grove, Ill: Waveland Press.
James A. Schellenberg, Conflict Resolution: Theory, Research, and Practice (Albany, NY:SUNY Press, 1996), p. 8.
Stone, D., Patton, B. & Heen, S. (1999). Difficult conversations: How to discuss what matters most. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc.