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Conflict Management and Resolution for Teams "Conflict is the gadfly of thought. It stirs us to observation and memory. It instigates to invention. It shocks us out of sheep like passivity, and sets us at noting and contriving. " -- John Dewey. When a group of individuals with varying experiences, thought processes and expectations work together as a team, conflict is inevitable. While many people see conflict as a sign of failure, teams can potentially use conflict as an asset.
Understanding conflict dynamics and cultural approaches to conflict management help teams to distill key points vital to a successful and productive resolution of team conflict. There are four basic types of conflict: emotional, cognitive, constructive and destructive. Emotional and destructive conflicts lead to an inability to resolve issues. Cognitive and constructive conflicts are a necessary part of finding successful solutions as a team. Emotional conflict is "personal, defensive, and resentful" (Thompson, Aranda, and Robbins, 2000) and of is based on anger, personality clashes, ego and tension. Emotional conflict occurs when individual interests trump the interests of the team as a whole.
This type of conflict interferes with the effort of a team to resolve a problem. Cognitive conflict occurs when team members voice different ideas and is "largely depersonalized" (Thompson, Aranda, and Robbins, 2000). As opposed to emotional conflict, his type of conflict is based on arguments about the merits of ideas, plans and projects. Because cognitive conflict is not based on personal feelings, it forces team members to rethink problems and arrive at a collective decision. Constructive conflict, as the name suggests, helps teams resolve problems and uncover new solutions to old issues in a productive manner (Thompson, Aranda, and Robbins, 2000).
It allows change and growth to occur within a team environment. Destructive conflict, like emotional conflict, causes dysfunction when a "lack of common agreement leads to negativism" (Thompson, Aranda, and Robbins, 2000). This disrupts the progress of all group members. Destructive conflict in teams diminishes the possibility of any problem resolution. Understanding and defining conflict terminology and conflict management is a first and important step in successful conflict management.
Since conflict is inevitable in any team or group situation, groups must cooperate to reach a successful resolution of any issues. Western conflict management theory places an emphasis on understanding and cooperation for the successful and permanent resolution of conflict. Since more than one issue, and more than one type of conflict, often is involved in the conflict, successful conflict management and resolution depends on a number of factors. Among them, teams must understand the different responses to conflict among team members. Regardless of your worldview, whether Marxist, realist, liberal or another view, conflict is universal.
Consequently, there are many theories on the topic of conflict management. While you will find no single definition of conflict management, many theories have been produced that attempt to explain conflict and ways to avoid or resolve conflicts. As explained earlier, Western conflict management is ultimately based on cooperation. Each contending worldview falls somewhere along this cooperation continuum. Most teams have individual members who fall into each category. On one extreme, a realist who believes in conflict as a zero-sum game without compromise would see team conflict as war.
From a realist worldview, teams submit ideas and fight until a clear winner emerges. To a realist, this is the only true method of resolving conflict. A liberal worldview, however, would advocate compromise or mediation to address team conflict. Others holding a more extreme liberal viewpoint might prefer to avoid conflict altogether to ensure that conflict resolution is not necessary.
Recent scandals in corporate America illustrate the shortfalls of this "commercial" liberal viewpoint. Rather than face potentially acrimonious disputes, corporate boards quietly signed off or ignored the abusive and illegal actions of executives. This avoidance of conflict at all costs led to the exacerbation of corporate abuses at companies like Tyco International and Enron. Given these contending worldviews, and others, we can explore how western societies may approach conflicts and conflict management. We can gain a better understanding of these approaches through international relation theory, since the international arena is the largest "team" and accounts for some of the most pointed conflicts. According to Professor Joseph Nye, "Since recurrent armed conflicts are frequently the product of enduring rivalries between pairs of hostile states, addressing and resolving animosities and problems in particular relationships is clearly a way to avert violent conflicts" (Nye, 1987).
Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his 1832 treatise On War that war is an instrument of policy, and that a nation's aim is to impose this policy on another nation or group of nations (Rosinski, 1976). This clearly realist theory can be applied to corporate boardrooms as well. Conflict is an instrument by which decision makers impose their will on other team members. Clearly, this theory is based on a realist's zero-sum game. Using Clausewitz's theory, one team member's ideas must "win" and other team member's ideas must "lose" in order to resolve conflict. Western conflict resolution explores the idea of achieving mutually beneficial terms to resolve a dispute through cooperation.
This means that each team member must hear and understand the position of each other team member not only from their own perspective, but the perspective of other team members as well. If emotional conflict emerges, members may try to impose their will on others. Team members who are embroiled in emotional conflict will feel as though they are yielding ground if other team members overrule their suggestions. Likewise, if a team member is less concerned about their ideas and goals than others, that team member will avoid conflict because the costs outweigh the benefits. In between these two extremes is cognitive and constructive conflict, where team members balance the ideas, goals and concerns of all team members in reaching a negotiated resolution. In the international arena, both realists who subscribe to Clausewitz's war theories and liberals would agree that cooperation between states results in mutual benefit.
However, realists and liberals disagree on the situations where multilateral cooperation is beneficial. Realists point to empirical results that show cooperation is only useful when setting limited standards, such as in telecommunications with various networking standards or in international shipping with the INCOTERMS conventions. These results show that when multilateral actions, such as economic sanctions, fail, their failures are due to enforcement (i. e. conflict resolution) problems and not bargaining or conflict management issues (Fearon, 1998). The ultimate, albeit rarely attainable, conflict resolution is one where all team members achieve their goals and where the conflict has been permanently resolved.
Robert Axelrod, a leading author on conflict management, offers a compelling theory on the importance of cooperation in resolving conflicts. Robert Axelrod's Prisoner's Dilemma demonstrates the power of cooperation in leading to successful and permanent resolutions of conflict (Axelrod, 1984). Axelrod set up a game theory around a seemingly simple scenario. In Axelrod's Dilemma game, two players are given the choice to "cooperate" or "defect." Axelrod's game got its name from a hypothetical situation where two alleged criminals are detained for questioning in a crime.
The police do not have enough evidence to convict either criminal. The two prisoners are isolated from each other and interrogated. The police offer both men a deal: offer evidence against the other detainee and go free. If neither accepts the offer, but cooperate with each other through silence, both will receive only a small punishment due to the lack of evidence. However, if one betrays the other by confessing, he will gain the most by being freed and given immunity. The prisoner whose silent cooperation was not returned by the other prisoner will face the full punishment for the crime.
If both prisoners betray the other, then both will be punished. This case, both will be punished less severely than if they had refused to talk at all. The dilemma is that both prisoners have a choice between a good and bad decision, but cannot make the good decision without knowing what the other prisoner will do. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, only cooperation, and placing the importance on the other person's interests, can avoid the lose-lose situation of punishment.
This cooperation forms the foundation of Western conflict management theory. To achieve this cooperation, each team m...
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Research essay sample on Conflict Management And Resolution For Teams
