Week 5 - Power and Conflict at work

Conflict is present where there is an incompatibility of goals arising from opposing behaviours at the individual, group or organisational level. Particularly, conflict is behaviour intended to obstruct the achievement of some other person’s goals.

One of the mains conflicts that I have been involved in is at my workplace. As I work in a call centre, it is very important that all employees meet their daily strike rates and if this is not done, then the marketing department lack work and this can cause tension between the call centre employees and the office employees. One of the main conflicts that have happened at work is that there was a time when a group of people who were set onto a specific survey did not get any completed at all. Once the supervisors started to notice that none of these surveys were getting completed, they immediately tried to find out what the problem was and automatically the blame came to the employees for not working hard enough. So once the employees started to try harder and try to get some of the surveys completed, there was still not much being done and the supervisors had noticed that it wasn’t the employees, that it was the survey itself. The survey’s introduction was rather long and because of this people did not want to hear all of it and wouldn’t take part because of the long introduction which took up so much of the time that the respondents would decide not to take part and waste any more time. Therefore, to overcome this kind of conflict in the future, they changed the script of the survey, tested it to make sure that it was the right thing to do and ensured that there would no longer be any reason for there not to be as much surveys completed because of the changed script.

Sources of power are usually the potential sources of organisational conflict. Some are:

· Differences in perception: This result in different people attaching different meaning to the same stimuli. With perceptions being a person’s reality, these different value judgements can be potentially major sources of conflict.
· Limited resources: Many organisations have limited resources and therefore most of the time individuals have to fight for their share in a certain aspect of the business. The greater the limitation of resources, normally there is greater potential for conflict, especially when the limitation is to do with things such as profit and revenue.
· Departmentalisation and Specialisation: Within an organisation there are usually many different departments. When employees become familiar with their particular departments they tend to focus only on the achievement of their particular goals and therefore when the time comes to co-operate with other departments, there is usually a frequent source of conflict.

There are 5 steps that can be used to overcome conflict at work. These are:

1. Analysing the conflict - This is done so that you can understand the nature and the type of conflict. This is usually done by asking questions and familiarising oneself with the actual conflict and what has happened.

2. Determine management strategy – Once there is a general understanding of the conflict, the groups involved can select the most appropriate strategy to overcome the current conflict. In some cases it helps to have someone who is neutral who helps the group move towards the consensus.

3. Pre-negotiation – This is done to set the stage for effective negotiation as the basic groundwork must be laid to assess the situation and make clear any ground rules and the agenda.

4. Negotiation – This should be done in a way that openly discusses interests, rather than stated positions and things such as the reasons, needs, concerns, and motivations which are underlying the positions. The satisfaction of interests should be a common goal.

5. Post-negotiation – Once negotiation is complete, the group will need to implement any decisions made. This includes things such as communication and collaboration and ensuring the progress is monitored to ensure that the best strategy has been chosen and implemented.

http://www.ctic.purdue.edu/kyw/brochures/manageconflict.html