Question

Conflict Management

(What are potential conflicts that might arise among or between team members. How will we deal with these and other conflicts? Are there underlying demographic variations that might lead to conflict? Age? Gender? Culture?)

Answer 1

Conflict in genrally defined as a hostility between team meambers or two individuals, which may lead to block the action or decision of the opposite person, Conflict is inevitable in nature, as a team leader either we need to deal woth it or ignore it.

• in general conflict can be dived into two tyoes

a) Substantive conflict : such conflict may arise when neither the party are willing ot give away on their positions.

b) Emotional conflict: generally different working styles, leads to this type of conflict, such as jealousy, insecurity, annoyance or personality conflicts.

Conflicts may arise beacuse, when both parties focus on personal issues rather than work related issues,conflict always might not me a bad thing, sometimes healthy competition let the team achieve greater results.

Common types of conflicts are as follows:

Competition over resources:

such as money, supplies, information etc. suppose Maria is an operation team manager and she needs to update about the work progess in her department, to update the details she needs to now take the help of IT dept to use a system, but in the IT dept system are busy 24?7 this created a conflict between Maria and IT dept head Jakson.

In this senario, Jakson can actaully help Maria by providing certain time slot to let her do work, or Ignore. If Jakson ignore the problem what Maria facing, this may effect the performance of both the teams. The first solution may be helpful to both the team leaders to improvise their team performance.

Communication Breakout:

Such conflicts may araise in the team, when team has cross culture members and if the team works virtually. In a company a team includes five members, due to pandemic, the team was not introduced to each other physically, as the team has no bonding and the team members could understan the language easily, this led to the down performance of the team, eventually the members of the team lost interest in working and started quitting the job, unfortuanately the company lost a few worthy employees.

In this situation the team manager need to take a forward step to bulid a rapo among the team members by conducting a few virtual games to motivate the team to stay connnecte with eachother and understand eachother ina better way.

External work conditions:

The confidence of the team always stay strong when the members of the team know the difference between a gossip and the real information.

It is the job the leader to let the team know about in a time to time basis, about the comoany and let no the members of the team stay connected to gossips.

Yes, sometimes or frequently the dempgraphic conditions adds the fuel to fire called as conflict like age, gender, culture.

So, to avoid such things to happen in the team, it is the job of the leader to let every team member to connect each other and remove the barriers.