Question

When someone states that they are in a conflict, what is your thought. Are dealing with a negative situation. Conflict… can have both positive and negative influences on an Firm. Highlight the goal of effective management: eliminate conflict or embrace it. Is conflict good for an organization or dysfunctional…

Evaluate how stimulating conflict can be used to reap functional rewards for organizations. Use examples to support your reasoning.

Analyze how some conflicts are dysfunctional, and why it is management’s responsibility to keep conflict intensity in some situations low. Use examples to support your reasoning.

Answer 1

Conflict doesnt always mean it has only a negative side. Conflict between two parties are a clear statement that there are multiple thought process to any situation. Conflict raises the need to think from other partys view point and improve openness people. The goal of an effective management is to embrace conflicts but in a controlled way that it doesnt go out of hand.

Lets consider a group discussion in making a certain decision on a new product launch. Since its a business decision teams from multiple departments are present. The sales team presents a new product launch with all the background research and puts forward an ask for a budget approval. This includes marketing, procurement, man power etc. However, the finance team is not okay with this plan because they are aware of the fact that the previous two launches have not been a great success and they are stuck with a lot of inventory. Now investing in a new product altogether might lead to a cash crunch in the company and chances of failure also cannot be ignored.  So this differences lead ways to conflit within group. However, this gives a perspective to everyone about other aspects of business and they learn to appreciate things out of their scope or knowledge as well. Now, if the teams work together, they can understand that there is some money with the finance team which the sales team can use. Sales team then comes up with a plan to re invest in the earlier launch by identifying the mistakes of the previous launch. This gives a confidence to finance team as well that some of the inventory will be cleared. This action came out as a result of the conflit.

Sometimes conflit among individuals can get out of control and it starts affecting the productivity. For example, team conflicts, dispute between peers, boss-reportee dispute etc. Lets consider there is a demand planner and operations manager of an FMCG firm. Demand planner is planning for a huge increase in demand for the product due to certain seasonality factor and has estimated a huge value. However the operations manager feels that this decison was made without his knowledge and he is not prepared for this. This leads to a peer conflict and if management doesnt address it at the right time, can lead to mis management of inventory and directly impacts sales. So this is how important conflict management is. To resolve conflicts, big companies have HR department who should encourage counselling, conflict resolving committee, Peer based performace appraisal etc.