Conflict is a natural part of organizational life that can have both positive and negative consequences. While dysfunctional conflict tends to be destructive, functional conflict can stimulate new ideas and motivate change. There are various levels of conflict within individuals, groups, and across entire organizations. Common causes of conflict include scarce resources and poor communication. Effective conflict management involves understanding different conflict orientations and styles, and using approaches that create win-win solutions where all parties' concerns are addressed. Tools like negotiation skills and emotional intelligence can help reduce conflict.

1. –Copyright © 2003 McGraw-Hill Australia Pty Ltd.
–PPTs t/a Human Resource Management in Australia: Strategy-People-Performance
–by De Cieri & Kramar
Conflict in Organizations
“Can’t We All Just Get Along”
Rodney King

2. Introduction
Opposition
Incompatible behavior
Aggressive interaction
Block another party from reaching her or his
goals
Disagreements
Debates
Disputes

3. (Cont.)
 Conflict is not always bad for an
organization
 Do not need to reduce all conflict
 An inevitable part of organization life
 Needed for growth and survival
 Conflict management includes increasing
and decreasing conflict
 Major management responsibility

4. What is conflict?
• A battle, contest or opposing forces existing
between primitive desires and moral, religious
or ethical ideas ( Webster’s Dictionary)
• A state of incompatibility of ideas between
two or more parties or individuals
–
Conflict management is the practice of identifying and
handling conflict in a sensible, fair and efficient
manner

5. Nature of Organizational
Conflict
Conflict – any situation in which
incompatible goals, attitudes, emotions,
or behaviors lead to disagreement or
opposition between two or more parties
Functional Conflict – a healthy,
constructive disagreement between two
or more people
Dysfunctional Conflict – an unhealthy,
destructive disagreement between two
or more people

6. Functional Conflict
 “Constructive
Conflict”--Mary Parker
Follett (1925)
 Increases information
and ideas
 Encourages innovative
thinking
 Unleashes different
points of view
 Reduces stagnation
Dysfunctional
Conflict
 Tension, anxiety, stress
 Drives out low conflict
tolerant people
 Reduced trust
 Poor decisions because
of withheld or distorted
information
 Excessive management
focus on the conflict

7. Consequences of Conflict
Positive
Consequences
Negative
Consequences
Leads to new ideas Diverts energy from work
Stimulates creativity
Threatens psychological
well-being
Motivates change Wastes resources
Promotes organizational
vitality
Creates a negative climate
Helps individuals and groups
establish identities
Breaks down group cohesion
Serves as a safety valve to
indicate problems
Can increase hostility and
aggressive behaviors

8. –©
2009
Ceng
age
Learn
ing.
All
rights
reser
ved.
Emotional Intelligence (EI)
Emotional intelligence
 the power to control one’s emotions
 perceive emotions in others
 adapt to change
 manage adversity

9. Importance of Conflict
Management Skills
–“As managers we spend
about 21% of our time
dealing with conflict.”
• Conflict management skills predict
managerial success
• High Emotional Intelligence (EI) needed
to manage conflict
• EI is valid across cultures

10. Levels and Types of Conflict
Individual
Group
Organization
Type of conflictLevel of conflict
Within and between organizations
Within and between groups
Within and between individuals

11. Organization conflict
 Intra-organization conflict
Conflict that occurs within an organization
Can occur along the vertical and horizontal dimensions of the
organization
Vertical conflict: between managers and subordinates
Horizontal conflict: between departments and work groups
 Inter-organization conflict
Between two or more organizations
Not competition
Examples: suppliers and distributors, especially with the close links now possible

12. Group Conflict
 Intragroup conflict
Conflict among members of a group
 Intergroup conflict:
between two or more groups

13. Individual Conflict
 Interpersonal conflict
Between two or more people
Differences in views about what should be done
Efforts to get more resources
Differences in orientation to work and time in different parts of an
organization
 Intrapersonal conflict
Occurs within an individual
Threat to a person’s values
Feeling of unfair treatment
Multiple and contradictory sources of socialization
Related to the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
negative inequity

14. “Bully” Gates?
In a small conference room on the Microsoft campus, Bill Gates is meeting with twenty
young Microsoft employees, all looking fearful. Gates is peeved, to put it
mildly. “You’ve studied it and studied it and decided that it’s turning bits on and off! And it’s a
BRILLIANT INSIGHT! . . . And then there’s this relationship with
Hewlett-Packard that we KEEP SCREWING UP! . . . What about this [expletive] thing with
no definition!” The “sour smell of sweaty terror” permeates the
room.
One of the Microsofties gets exactly five words out of his mouth when Gates cuts him off
with a string of obscenities. He sits down and one of his more composed teammates takes a
turn. Someone timidly offers Gates a proposition. Gates screams at him. Someone else tries
a rebuttal. Gates screams at him. This pattern continues for an hour.
A young, soft-spoken Chinese woman directs comments at Gates while he is in mid-tirade.
Both times, no one but Gates seems to understand her— her voice is barely audible, and
English appears to be her fourth language, after Chinese, C, and C++. Incredibly, her
comments seem to calm Bill Gates down. “Okay,” he says quietly, “this looks good. Go
ahead”—and abruptly he leaves the meeting. His prisoners run away, afraid he might
suddenly change his mind and begin berating them again.
Is Bill Gates a bully? Or, does he just hate
–Bill Gates has been known to criticize/ scold employees for
unsatisfactory performance, even insulting and yelling at
them.

15. Conflict Episodes
Latent conflict
Conflict aftermath
Manifest conflict
–antecedents of conflict behavior that can start conflict episode . Example: scarce resources
– observable conflict behavior (Parking spaces ,University policies
–End of a conflict episode
–Becomes the latent conflict for another episode
–Example: - compromise in allocating scarce resources leaves both parties with less than
they wanted
Conflict reduction
Perceived conflict
Felt conflict

16. Antecedent Conditions
 Scarce Resources
 Conflicting attitude
 Ambiguous jurisdiction
 Communication barriers
 Need for consensus
 Unresolved prior conflicts
 Knowledge of self and others

17.  Perceived conflict
Become aware that one is in
conflict with another party
Can block out some conflict
Can perceive conflict when
no latent conditions exist
Example: misunderstanding
another person’s position on
an issue
 Felt conflict
Emotional part of conflict
Personalizing the conflict
Oral and physical hostility
Hard to manage episodes with
high felt conflict
What people likely recall about
conflict

18. Conflict Frames
and Orientations (Cont.)
Relationship-Task
Emotional-Intellectual
Cooperate-Win
Conflict
frame

19. Conflict frame dimensions
Relationship-Task
Relationship: focuses on interpersonal relationships
Task: focuses on material aspects of an episode
Emotional-Intellectual
Emotional: focuses on feelings in the conflict episode
(felt conflict)
Intellectual: focuses on observed behavior (manifest
conflict)
Cooperate-Win
Cooperate: emphasizes the role of all parties to the
conflict
Win: wants to maximize personal gain

20. Conflict Management Styles
–Cooperativeness
–(Desire to satisfy another’s concerns)
–Assertiveness
–(Desire to satisfy one’s
own concerns)
–Competing –Collaborating
–Compromising
–Avoiding –Accommodating
–Uncooperative –Cooperative
–Assertive
–Unassertive

21. Methods to deal with conflicts
 Competition (win-lose situation)
 Accommodation (win-win situation)
 Avoidance (lose-lose situation)
 Compromise (lose-lose situation)
 Collaboration (win-win situation)

22. Reducing Conflict
 Overview
Lose-lose methods: parties to the conflict
episode do not get what they want
Win-lose methods: one party a clear winner;
other party a clear loser
Win-win methods: each party to the conflict
episode gets what he or she wants

23. Lose-lose
methods
Win-lose
methods
Win-win
methods
Avoidance
Withdraw, stay
away
Does not
permanently
reduce conflict
Compromise
Bargain,
negotiate
Each loses
something
valued
Smoothing:
find similarities
Dominance
Overwhelm other
party
Overwhelms an
avoidance
orientation
Authoritative
command:
decision by person in
authority
Majority rule:
voting
Problem solving:
find root causes
Integration: meet
interests and desires
of all parties
Superordinate goal:
desired by all but not
reachable alone

24. Conflict Management Tools
–High emotional
intelligence
–Ability to reduce
organizational toxins
–Negotiation skills

25. Steps to resolve conflicts
 Assure privacy
 Empathize than sympathize
 Listen actively
 Maintain equity
 Focus on issue, not on personality
 Avoid blame
 Identify key theme
 Re-state key theme frequently
 Encourage feedback
 Identify alternate solutions
 Give your positive feedback
 Agree on an action plan

26. How to prevent conflicts
 Frequent meeting of your team
 Allow your team to express openly
 Sharing objectives
 Having a clear and detailed job description
 Distributing task fairly
 Never criticize team members publicly
 Always be fair and just with your team
 Being a role model

27. For 10 years after she left a job working for a woman who used to humiliate her, Kim Potter, a claims manager at an insurance company, had
nightmares. After law school, she took a job at a law firm, working for a senior associate who called her "stupid" and "incompetent" and said
things like, "Can't you get anything right?" In one nightmare, she was back at her old firm with her old boss. "She had me making the partners
red beans and rice instead of doing legal work," she recalls.
Ms. Potter's nightmares about her former humiliatrix also had contours of fear unabated or vengeance never meted. Whenever Ms. Potter took a
new job, she would dream that her former boss started working there, too, only to rise as her tormentor again. Ms. Potter, who says she hasn't
come to blows in adulthood, also dreamed that though she punched her old boss repeatedly, she was impervious.
"I've never been treated so shabbily in my life," she said of the real-life experience. "And I never will."
Ms. Potter is probably right. Workplace humiliation has been around since history's first angry tyrants flew off the handle. But public humiliation
has become taboo at work, indicting the humiliator more than the humiliated. Powerful forces work against it, such as fear of liability and
economics. As the handy productivity-measurement industry will testify: Happy workers are good for the bottom line.
The problem is, humiliation has been driven underground, making it more subtle but no less horrifying. It takes the shapeless form of tones of
voice and "nasty looks" doled out not by hotheads, but by seemingly normal people. The devil, it turns out, also wears shoddy wing tips and
down-market pumps.
"The crude and lewd person who does the public display are in the minority of aggressors; most people are a lot more sophisticated," says Gary
Namie, a social psychologist. "They're not psychopaths."
That means that when victims complain, they aren't believed or are characterized as being unable to handle criticism, he says.
Mr. Namie is the director of the Workplace Bullying & Trauma Institute, which is pushing various states to enact laws against "abusive conduct,"
including "verbal or physical conduct that a reasonable person would find threatening, intimidating, or humiliating." Thus far, the bills either died
in committee or weren't scheduled for hearings, he says.
In a survey this year by Randstad USA, a temporary-staffing firm, 37% of respondents called "public reprimand" among their biggest pet peeves,
out-irritating them more than micromanagers (34%), loud talkers (32%) and cellphones ringing (30%). The only thing more annoying than public
reprimand in the survey was "condescending tones" (44%), arguably a humiliator's desert-island selection.
Richard Kilburg, senior director of the Office of Human Services at Johns Hopkins University, notes that public humiliation still exists in the
armed services and sports (think end-zone dances) but has morphed into "private shaming games" in industry.
That includes infractions as subtle as how quickly someone answers your email, makes eye contact or loads up some silence in a scenario like
this: In a meeting, a woman responds to her boss who gives her no response, yet minutes later applauds a male colleague who said basically
the same thing. "I hear that over and over again," Prof. Kilburg says.
Still, these days, when people are confronted with the old-style Cro-Magnon management, they are shocked. When John Ledbetter, president of
oil exploration and health resources company Nyvatex, was attending a conference roughly five years ago, a staffer at another company
presented information that didn't sit well with his supervisor. He chewed him out afterward in front of all his colleagues. "That idea is so wrong it's
not even stupid," the boss yelled. "Genius has limits; you're proof that stupid doesn't."
"Isn't that vicious?" says Mr. Ledbetter, incredulous. "Today that would be a cause for lawsuits!"
Jackie Fox once had a boss at a medical office who, whenever Ms. Fox forgot to do something, would call her a "colander head." She quit that
job, in part because the same humiliator pressured her for her sandwich. These days, such hardships sound like the office equivalent of
shoeless walks to school.
Although consultant Gary Schmidt doesn't believe competent managers should have to brandish their power in the form of humiliation, he has to
admit, it sometimes works.
When he was working for a large consulting firm, one of his managers used to police people who blathered on with a deadpan: "You
demonstrate a remarkable grasp of the obvious."
His own tactics are subtler. He may say in a meeting, for example, "May I offer a different perspective?"
Says Mr. Schmidt: "People who know me know that translates into, 'Are you out of your freakin' mind?!' "