Question

Manage U: Effectively Managing Team Conflict The career readiness competencies of oral communication, teamwork/collaboration, leadership, and social intelligence can be applied to deal with team conflicts. Your first step in working to resolve a conflict between group members is to ask a lot of questions. This allows you to get the information you need to determine what the disagreement is about and to identify many possible solutions for resolving the conflict. Next, frame the conflict around behavior, not personalities. Behaviors are more easily changed than someone’s personality. If you established appropriate group norms while forming the group, it is important to encourage team members to follow those norms. Choose your words with care when dealing with a conflict. You want to avoid absolutes such as always or never, and use specific, descriptive words rather than evaluative statements. Finally, it is important to remember that conflict can be productive. Functional conflict can foster new ideas and innovative thinking. Discussion: Think back to a conflict that occurred in a group or team to which you belong. What was the real cause of the disagreement, and how was it resolved? Would you do anything differently if you could?

Answer 1

Conflict that occurred in a group or team to which you belong:

Once there was a major conflict in the team when there was a discussion about Decrease in productivity in the organization as a whole.

The real cause of the disagreement was:

The cause for disagreement arised was each team member stared becoming defensive and started blaming each other, the other teams and various other reasons rather than focusing on the mail topic which was the Organization productivity and the main reasons for its reduction.

It was resolved through below ways:

1. The manager came up with facts and figures.

2. He tried convincing the team stating that the discussion was all about the whole organization’s performance and there was no panic needed.

3. The manager used accommodating style of conflict resolution wherein agreeging and acknowledging all the team members point of view and suggestions.

I would have followed the Conflict Resolution process as below:

1. Problem identification: The first process in conflict resolution is to identify what problem to be solved. Since this was a group conflict a brainstorming session could have been done to views and opinions on the issue.

2. Information gathering and analysing: Collect internal and external data related to the actual problem and then analyze the data.

3. Implementation: Work out on the solution with the agreeableness of both the parties.

4. Feedback: Finally take feedback and follow ups for improvements