Managing Team Conflict and Group Behavior - Essay Example

 Conflict in a team arises from the conflict of views of the team members. Successful management of conflict makes the team stronger. Knowing the origin of a conflict helps a leader determine whether it is functional or dysfunctional. Functional conflicts are productive while dysfunctional conflicts are disruptive. Common sources of conflict in the team are the limitation of resources and the values, attitudes, goals, roles, personalities, interdependency, and interaction of the team members. Allan C. Amazon has identified two types of conflict, namely cognitive conflict and affective conflict. Amazon’s research suggests that both types of conflicts are necessarily present in any kind of group, with the cognitive conflict being productive and the affective conflict being disruptive. Cognitive conflicts lead to the personal growth of the team members, identification of a workable solution, and increased integration and cohesiveness of the team members whereas affective conflicts lead to unresolved problems, waste of energy, the decline in the team’s morale, and team division. Training the team members in such core competencies as knowledge of conflict resolution methods, entrustment, and cooperation is fundamental to the success of a team. Monmouth University proposes a five-stage conflict management strategy. The five stages are awareness of conflict resolution, training in conflict resolution, mediation, reinforcement workshops, and program institutionalization. Conflict resolution requires a leader to remain impartial and promote mutual understanding among the team members. To help prevent conflict from occurring, the leader should establish ground rules at the outset, develop team agreement on the way to resolve conflict, train the team members on communication skills, and focus on the team’s objectives. There are numerous reactive strategies that a leader may adopt to resolve the conflict. The leader can either adopt an authoritative style, a splitting differences approach, a sacrificial approach, a sidestepping or delaying approach, or a step-by-step approach. One element that is common in all these approaches is the fact that the leader gains the trust and confidence of the followers and is able to convince them to follow his/her instructions wholeheartedly. In the step-by-step approach, the leader establishes a conflict resolution environment, establishes conflict as a problem for all and gains the members’ consent to resolve it, identifies the causes of conflict and the possible solutions with the mutual consensus of the members, implements the solution and see whether it has worked or not. If it doesn’t work, the leader should regain the consent of the members on a different solution and follow the remaining steps as such. Finally, Phillips reflects upon her purpose in doing this research and gives personal opinions about the adequate conflict management process.