4 Dealing with conflict
People don’t like to confront disagreement as for most of us this means an uncomfortable emotional encounter and something to be avoided.
However, some level of conflict is inevitable in many parts of life, so how you learn to deal with it is important. In Activity 3, you’ll start by reflecting on your own experience of conflict in the workplace.
Activity 3 Experience of conflict
What has your experience of conflict been? Consider conflict that has arisen in teams and groups you have been part of, or even amongst your peers or family members. How do you tend to react to conflict and how does it make you feel? Ask yourself:
- What conflicts have arisen in your team?
- How have they been resolved?
- What role do you play in resolving these conflicts?
- What could you or others do to improve the team’s ability to deal with conflict?
Write your thoughts in the box below.
Comment
Well done for attempting this activity. You might have found it difficult, as just thinking about a conflict can make us feel uncomfortable.
It can be hard to work out what is going on in a conflict and you might have struggled to identify what your role was in helping to resolve the issue. Even if you feel you didn’t deal with the situation very well it is good to reflect on this and consider what you might do differently if faced with a similar situation in the future.
Did you come up with any suggestions about how you could improve the team’s ability to deal with conflict? You might have suggested talking to the other person when you and they are calmer, or listening more closely to their point of view. You may even have thought of avoiding the person you were in conflict with. While this is understandable, facing the conflict is usually more productive as you’ll see later in this section.
So, why is embracing and using disagreement an important team attitude? As you’ve already learned, a team is a group of people who are working together to reach a common goal. The fact is that all the people in the team are going to have different educational backgrounds, attitudes, experience, likes and dislikes. What may be important to you may not be important to another member of your team. Likewise, what is easy for you to understand may be confusing to someone else. However, it is actually these differences that make the team worthwhile. It is the very differences that cause conflict and disagreement about the way forward that enable the collective team experience to be of more value than one person doing the job on their own.
You’ll explore team diversity in more detail in Week 6.
Activity 4 Responses to conflict
There are several different ways to categorise conflict responses. The Lowry Group (2021) describes five:
- avoiding
- accommodation
- competition
- compromise, and
- collaboration.
Most of us have a response that we feel most comfortable with. Which response do you feel most describes your preferred style when dealing with conflict? In the table below type Yes next to your preferred style.
| Avoidance | You withdraw, suppress and deny the existence of the conflict. You are unassertive, neither pursuing your own interests in the situation nor supporting others in achieving theirs. | |
|---|---|---|
| Accommodation | Your main concern is to preserve the relationship, even if it means conceding your own goals. You may have a high need for acceptance by others. | |
| Competition | You have a strong concern for the achievement of your personal goals, even at the risk of damaging or destroying relationships. | |
| Compromise | You propose a middle ground, providing the other side with concessions while also expecting concessions from them. | |
| Collaboration | You have a high concern for both people and objectives, asking the question ‘is there a way to move beyond the adversarial positions and use a creative process to find a mutually satisfying solution?’ |
Comment
Everyone has a preferred way in which to deal with things. All of these responses are valid and in different circumstances could be the best way to move forward. For example, if your response to conflict is avoidance, this could work to your advantage when an email comes in from someone you don’t want to communicate with – the problem might be resolved without you, but that might not be a good approach if the email is from your boss and they need a response by the end of the day!
Can you recognise times when you have had to step out of your preferred style in order to get the job done?
You may recognise that you have had different responses to conflict depending on who the conflict has been with. If there are good levels of trust between individuals then it can feel more comfortable to enter into conflict over differences of opinion or interests. This is as true in the team or group setting as it is between individuals and this tells us something about the different ways that conflict may occur in different stages of group development (Table 4).
| Forming | Suppress conflict and stress unity. |
|---|---|
| Storming | Turbulent stage with conflicts over work, resources and goals. |
| Norming | Starting to see healthy conflict as teams start to collaborate. |
| Performing | Healthy conflict with differences of opinion welcomed and encouraged. |
Imagine trying to make a decision in a team which is actively trying to avoid disagreement and conflict. What do you think this would look like? Perhaps you would see differences minimised or overlooked, creative ideas simply put aside as too difficult to negotiate and people who you know had something valuable to say staying quiet. Whilst this kind of team is effectively avoiding conflict it is not going to be as productive as the team that learns to deal with conflict effectively.