What are the various types of conflict?

What are the various types of conflict? Analyze two instances of inter-departmental conflicts in your organization and discuss the sources and outcomes of those conflicts.

Answer.

Conflict is a natural disagreement resulting from individuals or groups that differ in attitudes, beliefs, values or needs. It can also originate from past rivalries and personality differences. Other causes of conflict include trying to negotiate before the timing is right or before needed information is available.

Following are different types of conflicts:
Intrapersonal Conflict. Intrapersonal conflict is internal to the individual (though its effects can profoundly influence organizational functioning) and is perhaps the most difficult form of conflict to analyze and manage. Intrapersonal conflict is basically a conflict between two incompatible tendencies. It arises when a stimulus evokes two different and incompatible tendencies and the individual is required to discriminate between these tendencies. In such a situation it is common for individuals to experience frustrations and to allow their conflict situation to be expressed in a range of behavioural strategies ranging from apathy and boredom to absenteeism, excessive drinking or destructive behaviour.

If such behavioural consequences are to be avoided, then it is essential to diagnose individual perception and utilize some techniques that would reduce anxiety-eliciting stimuli and increase consonance between individual behaviour and organizational requirements.

Interpersonal Conflict. Interpersonal conflict emphasizes the interaction of human factors in an organization. One can broadly suggest two classes of factors as conflict sources. These are:
1. Personal. Individuals are not identical, constant or consistent. When two individuals are brought together and kept together, each with his own qualities, needs and skills, a conflict may ensue if their attributes are not meshed together in a coordinated way. Interaction between individuals with different attitudes, values and needs can produce conflict behaviour and affect organizational performance.
2. Functional. Individuals in organizations have roles which are expected sets of behaviour associated with their position. In theory, individuals are not expected to engage in any discretionary behaviour. Such specification would be consistent with organizational preferences for consistency and predictability. In practice, however, role specifications tend to be ambiguous and incomplete, and in their interaction with others, some individuals often feel dissatisfied with their role or position, or they may feel that their aspirations for higher positions are being frustrated. Interpersonal conflict can be accounted for, to a great extent, in terms of the incumbents' roles and their expectations in particular situations.

Interdepartmental Conflict. The third major cause of organizational conflict is structural. Organizations are designed around product lines, regions or technical specialties. These activities are assigned to departments that often have mutually exclusive structured interests and goals and that interact within a framework of scarce resources and task dependence. When resources are relatively fixed and when one department's gain is at the expense of another, conflict should be expected. If two sub-units in an organizational system have differentiated goals and are functionally interdependent, conditions exist for conflict. Interdependence produces the need for collaboration, but it also presents occasions for conflict.

Other contextual factors which affect the interaction structure between departments and create the conditions for interdepartmental conflict include: different attitudes between line and staff units, organizational size (directly related to level of conflict) and standardization (inversely related to conflict), physical or communicational barriers between departments, unequal access to authority, rewards or organizational resources and ambiguity or uncertainty in assigning tasks or rewards to different departments.

These, then, are the sources of conflict situations in organizations. How a conflict situation will change over time, how its interrelated components will alter and the environment in which it occurs will respond, is dependent upon the administrator's efforts to manage or influence it. This, in turn, is related to one's understanding of the source of a specific conflict situation.

Example: Interdepartmental conflict
The president of the company was at the end of his rope in dealing with two employees who seemed to constantly march to their own drummer. These two employees would go around their bosses and create problems in other departments. The managers lacked the skills to address the issues with these problem employees. By the time the President asked to discuss the situation with him, he wanted to fire all four of them!

A plan was developed to identify the work related needs of the President, the managers and the employees. It was clear what the President wanted! It was not so clear what the managers and employees wanted. One-on-one meetings with each person identified what each needed from the other. These needs were outlined to identify what each need would look like when it was satisfactorily achieved and what the resulting benefit would be to the person and the company. Once the initial needs were addressed and achieved, additional needs were identified. This process continued until the parties involved could conduct the process themselves and report the achievements up the chain of command.

Today, the President, one manager and the two lower level employees remain and are achieving or exceeding performance expectations. The other manager decided on his own he did not enjoy being a manager and obtained a new position as an individual contributor within the same industry.


Example: Domestic/International Airline Carrier - Interdepartmental Conflict
This domestic in-flight services department has the responsibility of planning and delivering in-flight meals. Meals must be reproducible, storable and must conform to space and weight specifications. They depend on vendors to provide this service in a timely manner. This requires phenomenal teamwork which unfortunately was not present a short while ago. Infact, three teams constantly blamed the other two for poor performance. You could cut the tension with a knife. Essential communications that needed to take place - weren't! Vendors were catching the fallout and the quality of their service dropped even further.

The management thought of giving all the teams’ leadership training. Employees from each team were selected to join together for three separate Pathways to Leadership programs. They discovered that they had been strongly focused on everything that wasn't working. With so much energy focused backwards, there was very little left to solve problems in a healthy productive way. They learned a combination of tools that would enable them to focus on solutions.
q They discovered one of the most effective tools for turning dissension into cooperation -- the Recipe for Partnership. The tool works masterfully because the answers (and solutions) are their answers, not management's.
q At a special meeting, the three managers asked the first question of the Recipe: "What are some of the successes these three teams have created over the last year?" At first, there was silence. Then they began to identify these successes.
q The second question was, "What are some of the qualities that generated those successes?" Again, the group listed an array of virtues they shared within the department that made possible those wins.
q Rather than telling the staff what managers wanted from these teams, they asked. "What is your vision for what you want to produce together, and the way you want to treat each other in the process?"
q To really anchor the buy-in for the vision they created, the managers asked, "When you achieve this vision, what will be the benefits to you, your team members, the department and the company?" Finally the teams were at such a point of cooperation, they could address the last question in earnest; And this guaranteed teamwork and a successful resolution.

"Even before the end of the first Leadership training, the turnaround was evident. Participants came to know members of other teams on an individual basis and the resentments quickly began to fall away. With their new leadership skills, team members literally discovered a 'technology for communicating' they could immediately put to work. Even before our second session, I could see a 180-degree shift in how team leaders treated their front line workers. Vendors who used to be a tremendous headache, responded beautifully to our new approach. Also, we were on the verge of losing one of our key people, but now the comment I hear is, 'There's no place I'd rather be working.' I have to say that the overall shift is quite amazing."