Interpersonal Conflict
Conflict can lead to a serious problem in any organization. It might not lead to the firm’s failure but it certainly can hurt an organization’s performance as well as lead to the loss of many good employees. Organizational conflict is a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests between people working together. Conflict takes many forms in organizations, such as, interpersonal conflict, intragroup conflict, intergroup conflict and interorganisational conflict. In this discussion, we will mainly focus on interpersonal conflict.
Interpersonal conflict occurs when one person interferes or frustrates another person from achieving a goal. Components of Interpersonal Conflict
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It is important to ignore trivial conflicts and focus on vital ones. This further depicts that a manager needs to improve his conflict management skills for overall management effectiveness. This also shows that it is of utmost importance that a manager should be capable of resolving all vital conflicts effectively. When conflict at work is not handled correctly, the foundation of the team will break down, people will lose focus and the talents they bring to the table will not be utilised and go wasted. According to the Thomas-Kilmann Model, managers should keep in mind five conflict-resolution intentions to analyze and reduce interpersonal conflict in their organizations. Each of these conflict handling styles are based on two dimensions- cooperativeness (the degree to which one party attempts to satisfy the other party’s concerns) and assertiveness (the degree to which one party attempts to satisfy his or her own concerns). The following are the five conflict handling …show more content…
Functional conflict improves the quality of decisions, stimulates creativity and innovation, boosts interest and curiosity among group members, provides the medium through which problems can be shared, and fosters an environment of self-evaluation and change. Good conflict doesn’t allow a group to passively “rubber-stamp” decisions that may be based on weak assumptions, insufficient contemplation of relevant alternatives, or other debilities. Conflict challenges the status quo and therefore, leads to the creation of new ideas, promotes re-evaluation of group goals and activities, and increases the probability that of the group’s responsiveness to