Answer the following questions:
- Think about a conflict situation you have personally experienced at work that involved a manager/leader. Which conflict resolution technique discussed in the video was used to bring about a resolution?
- In the conflict situation mentioned above, would you have handled it the way the manager/leader did? If not, how would you have handled it?
- Richards discusses the idea of conflicts potentially being costly to an organization. What is an example of a conflict where you presently work (or have worked in the past) that was costly, in a monetary sense or otherwise?
Support your post by citing one reference (other than the text)
Module 4 Discussion – Conflict Intervention
A conflict situation at my workplace:
After the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, my organization decided to work virtually. All the members are advised to work from their homes to ensure everyone’s health and safety. This decision eventually leads to a huge change in the traditional work culture and the emergence of huge problems for the employees. Non-availability of the team members nearby, distance, and technical unawareness had made a big challenge in the circulation of proper communication among the team members (Winter, 2020, p.25).In order to resolve this problem, among the five discussed techniques in the video I would like to adopt the collaboration techniques.
Strategy to handle the conflict in the workplace:
Firstly, I checked that everyone was available at working time, the issues which usually occurred in the workplace like connectivity problems and technical problems should be managed by the self-responsibilities of the employees. After that, I enlisted all the major problems mentioned by the team members while working on the virtual platform. Also made an open discussion and brainstormed ideas to overcome those problems collectively as soon as possible. Thereafter I ensured that each team member was able to handle the new online communication software, and applications properly. For this, as a leader, I had to conduct a proper training and development session. I made sure that the distribution of the work and responsibilities had been properly done among the team members. Not only the distribution, but I had further ensured that everyone is able to receive and interpret the message correctly. Small and frequent meetings had been conducted to clear all the miscommunication and to check the status of the progress. Although building this kind of collaboration over the virtual media, had taken a lot of time and patience, but gradually was able to build trust, respect, and collaboration among the team members.
A costly conflict:
In my previous organization, the sudden resignation of our team leader put all the team members in huge conflict. We were on an ongoing project with a 10-member team working under him. In the lack of proper guidance and membership, the productivity of the whole team reduces abundantly. We were not able to manage work among ourselves and missed the deadlines. As a result, the project got canceled. It was a huge loss of money, labor, and time indeed.
Reference:
Winter, A. (2020). Problems working in semi and full-time virtual teams: Comparison of virtual team problems pre and post-Covid 19 epidemic (Bachelor’s thesis, University of Twente).
