Question

You have been assigned to work on a Marketing group project with randomly selected classmates. When you discover who will be your coworkers, you realize that the group is made up of students who do not take their work as seriously as you do. You are given until the end of the semester to complete the project, so you have plenty of time. You decide to take the lead and assign people to specific components of the project. When you meet with the group the first time, you assign the tasks only to find much discontent. Your classmates want to know what made you think you could just tell them what to do.

Which type of conflict is this and what is the loci of conflict?

Its an organizational behavior question

Answer 1

There are three types of conflict in organizational behavior :1) Relationship Conflict 2) Task Conflict and 3) Value/Process Based Conflict

Based on the situation above wherein the class is discontent because a group member has taken initiative to allocate tasks.The team members(classmates) are unhappy because they feel they have been ordered to do something without discussing or taking their opinion.They have not raised issue of the allocation of task or on any value based behavior.

From the above inference we can deduce that this is a Relationship Conflict wherein they feel uncomfortable/discontent on being ordered to do a certain task without their opinion

There are three types of loci of conflict 1)Intragroup Conflict 2) Intergroup Conflict and 3) Dyadic Conflict

Based on the situation above this is a conflict between the members(classmates) of a group.This is not a conflict between two members but a disconnect within the group hence Dyadic conflict is not the loci of the conflict.Since there is only one group hence Integroup Conflict is ruled out.

From the above inference we can deduce that the loci of the conflict is 1)Intragroup Conflict since the conflict happens between two( or more as the case study shows) members of the same team.