Conflict
At some point in life, you will experience conflict. Conflicts arise to due to issues that can’t be resolved and escalate to an emotional level (Lau, 2008). Conflicts can bring about feelings of anger, resentment or pain. Five areas of conflict I will discuss further are: why conflict occurs, conflict management, the positive and negative effects of conflict, stress and anger, and forgiveness. I experienced conflict in my professional workplace two years ago when I accepted a contract position as the bid department manager while the manager went out on maternity leave. I had two employees, with the same job title who began to resent each other. I was faced with the challenge of helping to resolve the conflict between the two employees. Through this challenge, I learned that we can diffuse conflict when we learn how to recognize and understand it, identify personality or style differences in individuals, and by encouraging others to learn to see the positive side of the conflict.
When I first fell in love with my first boyfriend I adored everything about him. I loved the way he smiled, walked, spoke my name and made me feel. As we grew closer, my emotions got deeper. Once day he told me he was going to call my after he got out of football practice, I waited and the call never came. The next day at school I asked why he didn’t call and he said he got home tired and fell asleep. I smiled and pretended it didn’t bother me but deep down it did. Later that week it happened again, I buried the hurt and tried to be understanding but deep down I felt that he could have called when he got home to at least let me know he was tired and was going to bed so that I was not left waiting up for his call. Over the next few weeks he did the same thing a few more times, he told me he would call and didn’t. Eventually, one morning after waiting for his call the night prior that never came, he came up to me the next day at school and my emotions exploded negatively on him. All the emotion I kept locked trying to avoid came out abruptly and lead to us arguing. I told him I had no time to talk to him since he could not find the time to call me as he said he would. He became angry and embarrassed at the way I treated him and we broke up.
Back then I was a young girl in love, trying to avoid conflict. I thought my first love could do no wrong, but quickly learned that conflict was inevitable. When we accept that conflicts will occur in our personal lives and professional settings we can also come to the realization that they do not have to escalate out of control. If I had been able to communicate to him and explain to him how he made me feel the first time he did not keep his word perhaps that would have avoided me blowing up. The fact is, I was very young and very inexperienced in conflict management and had a lot to learn.
Conflict is defined a clash between two individuals arising out of a difference in thought, process, attitudes, understanding, interests, requirements and even sometimes perceptions (Montenska, 2014). Conflicts go through different stages of development. Managers that work closely with their teams can sometimes recognize conflict in before it arises. That is not always the case. Even when arising conflicts are not caught at pre-conflict phase they can still be managed, “… at any stage of conflict management with the adequacy of the management actions, the development of the conflict can be stopped” (Mostenska, 2014). In my position as a manager, when I noticed conflict between two employees, my goal was to resolve the conflict positively. I knew that I had to listen to both sides and act as a mediator rather than exerting power of the situation. They were two adults who just needed someone to step in and assist them in sharing what was causing them to be unhappy in the workplace and in trying to get them to understand their fellow co-workers position.
In addition to interpersonal conflict in the workplace, corporate conflict also exists. As stated by Mostenska in his article on Conflicts in Organizations, corporate conflict can be defined as differences between shareholders and manager leading to lawsuits that can lead to early termination of powers as well as significant changes (Mostenska, 2014). A conflict recently had to be resolved at the company I work for. There was a situation in which a sales manager was signed a master contract when he held no authority to bind the company. The statues of the contract agreed to terms that negatively impacted our company and agreed to very low profit margins in addition to allowing security interests on equipment that had not yet installed for a period. The contract term we were now locked into was three years. The sales manager’s reason for signing the contract was that it was a time sensitive matter. He claimed the deal would have been lost had he gone through the appropriate channels and had the staff counsel review the terms and had a corporate officer sign it. The board of directors (shareholders) now had to meet and decide how to handle this conflict and resolve it.
Being that my company is a small corporation, this is not the first occurrence of this kind; however, due to the fact that it was a large global customer that we did many projects for, the corporate officers now realized that they could no longer allow contracts to be signed by managers who were not acting in the best interest of the company a whole. Although it was a difficult decision to make, the company officers decided that it was in the company’s best interest to terminate the mangers employment with the company. To prevent this conflict from occurring in the future my company must have a clear allocation of the functional responsibilities, authority and responsibility for decisions (Mostenska, 2014).
Anger is a negative emotion that can have effects on both our mental and physical health and cause damage to social relationships. Stress is something we all face in this modern world. Stress can be felt both internally and externally. We experience external stressors from interactions with family, work and friendships. In our personal lives we encounter financial pressures trying to make ends meet in order to keep up with our mortgages, home and car repairs, and college savings. We feel stress in the workplace trying to meet monthly quotas, please our bosses and also experience stress from friends who have expectations we are unable to meet. Internally we can stress over goals we want to achieve, competitors we want to beat, and things we want to obtain for our own personal joy or satisfaction. When we faces these stressors we all have different ways of coping. Anger is often a reaction to stress which then causes conflict to arise. The psychodynamic theory says that people experience conflict because of the tension arising from their intra-personal (internal, psychological, emotional, and mental) states (Cahn, 2014, p. 57).
Stress and anger were involved in the work conflict I describe in my opening paragraph. When one employee began feeling controlled and forced to take on a higher workload than her coworker, anger began to build up within her due to her overwhelming stress level. When an individual gets angry, there are different ways of expressing it or controlling the anger. Anger-In occurs when an individual keeps their anger inside and does not express it, Anger-Out occurs when an individual outwardly hits or hurts something or someone physically or by orally by using profane language, and Anger-Control occurs when the individual is capable of controlling their emotion by maintaining calm and tolerant or by being able to find an understanding and thereby calm their anger down (Arslan, 2010). The anger that each Karen and Mary felt was generated for different reasons. Mary was experiencing temporary anger due to the stress of feeling overworked while Karen was experiencing trait anger, because she disliked her environment and was frustrated by it (Arslan, 2010). Karen disliked her job and therefore, tried to push the difficult tasks off onto her coworker Mary, who was not the first coworker she had conflicts with.
In order for both Karen and Mary to understand why they were angry they must first analyze the stressors which caused the anger and try to understand and cope with them. If they each took time to think about what was the true cause of their frustrations, then they would be able to get to the root of the issue and find a resolution before it developed into a daily stress and lead to conflict between them. Mary perhaps could have avoided and/or altered her stress by communicating to her boss and sharing what was occurring and asking for the work process to be revised in order to ensure that even amounts of work were distributed between them.
Karen could have avoided the conflict and avoid upsetting her coworkers by accepting that her job came with tasks and responsibilities that had to be done and possibly could have spoken to her manager informing her how she felt and inquire if there were any other openings within the company that she could be considered for. Perhaps a change of responsibility or work scope would have provided Karen with a sense of renewal and challenge doing the type of work she enjoyed doing.
Had the employees been taught to properly manage their stress, conflict possibly could have been avoided. To resolve the daily conflict of them bickering with one another or giving each other the silent treatment, I had to diffuse their anger by meeting with each of them separately and finding out what was causing each of them to feel anger. They each opened up when they realized that unlike their manager on leave, I actually cared about their feelings and wanted to make the day to day tasks of the department enjoyable for both of them.
The extent to which an offender shows regret for what he/she has done or apologizes is likely to affect the other person’s perception of effectively being able to resolve the conflict (Paleari, 2010). Mary’s anger and un-forgiveness toward Karen stemmed from the fact that she felt Karen betrayed her trust to be spiteful. After talking with Karen, she shared with me that she was very remorseful and regretted what she had done. She shared this information to another coworker in confidence assuming that she was venting and that it would not get out. She accepted ownership for the fact that she was wrong to have shared it and only did so out of anger, but she truly had no intention of hurting Mary or sharing the private information to be vengeful. Although it hurt Mary, when I was able to get the two together to discuss the situation, Mary finally was able to understand Karen did not intentionally try to hurt her and agreed to try to restore the work relationship so that they could learn to work effectively together again.
When Karen saw that Mary had a forgiving heart and could let go of the offence, she gained a new found respect for Mary and made certain to never make that mistake again. Karen opened up and also shared that she was going through a lot in her personal life as well, she was going through a divorce at home and was reactive and lashed out on Mary. It took some time but Mary was able to see that forgiving Karen was not about “Karen”, she had to do it in order to find her own peace of mind at work and gave Karen the benefit of the doubt. She accepted that Karen made a mistake and over time was able to get past the conflict that once consumed her with anger and pain.
Stress in life may be unavoidable but if we learn to cope with it positively we will be better prepared to adapt and accept things which are out of our control. Stress is a process we can learn to manage, the ABC Model of Stress can be used as a tool to aide in stress management; “A” is learning to identify the activating event or stressor, “B” we can change our beliefs and thought process to learn to view the stressor in a positive view, and “C” is the consequence or outcome – we can learn to engage in supportive self-talk and focus on the positives in our lives. By changing our outlook from negative to positive one can look at the conflict as opportunity for challenge and growth. When we learn to positively manage conflict, stress, anger, and forgiveness can all be transformed from negative conflict to positive growth. Conflict management is a process of planning how to avoid conflict where it is possible and solve it after as quickly and smoothly as possible (Motenska, 2014). Conflict should be looked upon as a challenge to overcome, which can be both rewarding and positive.
Some of the reasons conflicts arise are due to differences in interests, age, values, differences in background, and personality type. According to ACAS the independent and impartial Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, sometimes the cause of the conflict is very obvious; however, there will be times when conflict may suddenly flare up due to the conflict remaining dormant for so long. (ACAS, 2014). In close relationships, chances for conflict increase because we care about these people; therefore, emotions are highly involved. The inevitability of conflict principle is self-explanatory: conflicts are inevitable (Cahn, 2014).
When I first fell in love with my first boyfriend I adored everything about him. I loved the way he smiled, walked, spoke my name and made me feel. As we grew closer, my emotions got deeper. Once day he told me he was going to call my after he got out of football practice, I waited and the call never came. The next day at school I asked why he didn’t call and he said he got home tired and fell asleep. I smiled and pretended it didn’t bother me but deep down it did. Later that week it happened again, I buried the hurt and tried to be understanding but deep down I felt that he could have called when he got home to at least let me know he was tired and was going to bed so that I was not left waiting up for his call. Over the next few weeks he did the same thing a few more times, he told me he would call and didn’t. Eventually, one morning after waiting for his call the night prior that never came, he came up to me the next day at school and my emotions exploded negatively on him. All the emotion I kept locked trying to avoid came out abruptly and lead to us arguing. I told him I had no time to talk to him since he could not find the time to call me as he said he would. He became angry and embarrassed at the way I treated him and we broke up.
Back then I was a young girl in love, trying to avoid conflict. I thought my first love could do no wrong, but quickly learned that conflict was inevitable. When we accept that conflicts will occur in our personal lives and professional settings we can also come to the realization that they do not have to escalate out of control. If I had been able to communicate to him and explain to him how he made me feel the first time he did not keep his word perhaps that would have avoided me blowing up. The fact is, I was very young and very inexperienced in conflict management and had a lot to learn.
Conflict Management
In addition to interpersonal conflict in the workplace, corporate conflict also exists. As stated by Mostenska in his article on Conflicts in Organizations, corporate conflict can be defined as differences between shareholders and manager leading to lawsuits that can lead to early termination of powers as well as significant changes (Mostenska, 2014). A conflict recently had to be resolved at the company I work for. There was a situation in which a sales manager was signed a master contract when he held no authority to bind the company. The statues of the contract agreed to terms that negatively impacted our company and agreed to very low profit margins in addition to allowing security interests on equipment that had not yet installed for a period. The contract term we were now locked into was three years. The sales manager’s reason for signing the contract was that it was a time sensitive matter. He claimed the deal would have been lost had he gone through the appropriate channels and had the staff counsel review the terms and had a corporate officer sign it. The board of directors (shareholders) now had to meet and decide how to handle this conflict and resolve it.
Being that my company is a small corporation, this is not the first occurrence of this kind; however, due to the fact that it was a large global customer that we did many projects for, the corporate officers now realized that they could no longer allow contracts to be signed by managers who were not acting in the best interest of the company a whole. Although it was a difficult decision to make, the company officers decided that it was in the company’s best interest to terminate the mangers employment with the company. To prevent this conflict from occurring in the future my company must have a clear allocation of the functional responsibilities, authority and responsibility for decisions (Mostenska, 2014).
Stress and Anger
Stress and anger were involved in the work conflict I describe in my opening paragraph. When one employee began feeling controlled and forced to take on a higher workload than her coworker, anger began to build up within her due to her overwhelming stress level. When an individual gets angry, there are different ways of expressing it or controlling the anger. Anger-In occurs when an individual keeps their anger inside and does not express it, Anger-Out occurs when an individual outwardly hits or hurts something or someone physically or by orally by using profane language, and Anger-Control occurs when the individual is capable of controlling their emotion by maintaining calm and tolerant or by being able to find an understanding and thereby calm their anger down (Arslan, 2010). The anger that each Karen and Mary felt was generated for different reasons. Mary was experiencing temporary anger due to the stress of feeling overworked while Karen was experiencing trait anger, because she disliked her environment and was frustrated by it (Arslan, 2010). Karen disliked her job and therefore, tried to push the difficult tasks off onto her coworker Mary, who was not the first coworker she had conflicts with.
In order for both Karen and Mary to understand why they were angry they must first analyze the stressors which caused the anger and try to understand and cope with them. If they each took time to think about what was the true cause of their frustrations, then they would be able to get to the root of the issue and find a resolution before it developed into a daily stress and lead to conflict between them. Mary perhaps could have avoided and/or altered her stress by communicating to her boss and sharing what was occurring and asking for the work process to be revised in order to ensure that even amounts of work were distributed between them.
Karen could have avoided the conflict and avoid upsetting her coworkers by accepting that her job came with tasks and responsibilities that had to be done and possibly could have spoken to her manager informing her how she felt and inquire if there were any other openings within the company that she could be considered for. Perhaps a change of responsibility or work scope would have provided Karen with a sense of renewal and challenge doing the type of work she enjoyed doing.
Had the employees been taught to properly manage their stress, conflict possibly could have been avoided. To resolve the daily conflict of them bickering with one another or giving each other the silent treatment, I had to diffuse their anger by meeting with each of them separately and finding out what was causing each of them to feel anger. They each opened up when they realized that unlike their manager on leave, I actually cared about their feelings and wanted to make the day to day tasks of the department enjoyable for both of them.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness can be a way to deal with an offence rather than as a way to deal with the conflict. When Mary began to become overwhelmed with the stress of doing larger workload, she began to withdraw from Karen. Feeling shut out and ignored caused Fran to also develop anger toward Mary, thus befriending an employee from another department and partaking in gossip, disclosing personal information about Mary. When Mary found out that about her past abortion was somehow a topic of discussion around the office, she became even angrier and hurt because Karen was the only person she shared this personal information with in confidence in a moment of need once day when she broke down crying at work. She felt that he could never forgive Karen for this offense. Forgiveness involves changes in thought, feelings, and motivations toward the offender (Paleari, 2010), and Mary needed help to get to this point.
The extent to which an offender shows regret for what he/she has done or apologizes is likely to affect the other person’s perception of effectively being able to resolve the conflict (Paleari, 2010). Mary’s anger and un-forgiveness toward Karen stemmed from the fact that she felt Karen betrayed her trust to be spiteful. After talking with Karen, she shared with me that she was very remorseful and regretted what she had done. She shared this information to another coworker in confidence assuming that she was venting and that it would not get out. She accepted ownership for the fact that she was wrong to have shared it and only did so out of anger, but she truly had no intention of hurting Mary or sharing the private information to be vengeful. Although it hurt Mary, when I was able to get the two together to discuss the situation, Mary finally was able to understand Karen did not intentionally try to hurt her and agreed to try to restore the work relationship so that they could learn to work effectively together again.
When Karen saw that Mary had a forgiving heart and could let go of the offence, she gained a new found respect for Mary and made certain to never make that mistake again. Karen opened up and also shared that she was going through a lot in her personal life as well, she was going through a divorce at home and was reactive and lashed out on Mary. It took some time but Mary was able to see that forgiving Karen was not about “Karen”, she had to do it in order to find her own peace of mind at work and gave Karen the benefit of the doubt. She accepted that Karen made a mistake and over time was able to get past the conflict that once consumed her with anger and pain.
Positive and Negative Effects of Conflict
Karen and Mary’s conflict originally arose due to differences in task conflict. Task conflict has been defined as “disagreements among group members about the content of the tasks being performed” (Todorova, 2014). Their manager failed to properly manage or delegate job tasks and expected them to share the workload. Karen being closer to retirement was not eager to take on anything challenging, she saw all the large bids that came through be worked on as negative. This negativity began to cause Mary, who had only been there a year to feel the same. Overall as a department, they each viewed their tasks as burdensome. They each had unique strengths that they could contribute to the department, but allowed negative emotions to get in the way of their performance. They could have learned to associate their differences with positive emotion if they knew how to communicate in conflicts. They would have benefited from learning from one another’s strengths to handle the challenges they were faced with positively rather than negatively.
Although I was only their manager for a few months, in order to resolve this their negative outlook I encouraged them to go to their manager when she returned and provide her with suggestions and input as to how she could make their jobs more enjoyable to them. When we constantly look at things negatively we are blinded and unable to see the positive that could come out of responsibilities we hold, even when they are small tasks. They each felt had unique viewpoints, ideas and opinions about the processes within their department that needed improvement and needed someone to help them see that task conflict could generate positive conflict for the both of them and allow them to learn about one another. As humans we all have good and bad characteristics, but if they worked together with their manager in developing a plan for process improvement then positive emotions such as excitement and enthusiasm for their work may arise.
Although I was only their manager for a few months, in order to resolve this their negative outlook I encouraged them to go to their manager when she returned and provide her with suggestions and input as to how she could make their jobs more enjoyable to them. When we constantly look at things negatively we are blinded and unable to see the positive that could come out of responsibilities we hold, even when they are small tasks. They each felt had unique viewpoints, ideas and opinions about the processes within their department that needed improvement and needed someone to help them see that task conflict could generate positive conflict for the both of them and allow them to learn about one another. As humans we all have good and bad characteristics, but if they worked together with their manager in developing a plan for process improvement then positive emotions such as excitement and enthusiasm for their work may arise.
How to Resolve
While conflict is inevitable, it can be managed. To do so individuals must learn to recognize the conflict and understand why it is occurring and learn to effectively communicate. In order to manage conflicts we must first calm ourselves, think of our position, prepare ourselves to consider the other persons position and listen to their side, and then communicate with them. This process is referred to as the S-TLC system: stop, think, listen, and communicate (Cahn, 2014). By listening we can gather information and allow the person we are in conflict with to see that our focus is not on winning but rather to come to a resolution. It also shows them that we actually care and desire a positive resolution for both sides. Rather than approaching someone when your are filled with negative emotions we should try to create nurturing climates which are more likely to create mutually satisfying outcomes and create positive nurturing climates that build up those we communicate with rather than tear them down. 
Stress in life may be unavoidable but if we learn to cope with it positively we will be better prepared to adapt and accept things which are out of our control. Stress is a process we can learn to manage, the ABC Model of Stress can be used as a tool to aide in stress management; “A” is learning to identify the activating event or stressor, “B” we can change our beliefs and thought process to learn to view the stressor in a positive view, and “C” is the consequence or outcome – we can learn to engage in supportive self-talk and focus on the positives in our lives. By changing our outlook from negative to positive one can look at the conflict as opportunity for challenge and growth. When we learn to positively manage conflict, stress, anger, and forgiveness can all be transformed from negative conflict to positive growth. Conflict management is a process of planning how to avoid conflict where it is possible and solve it after as quickly and smoothly as possible (Motenska, 2014). Conflict should be looked upon as a challenge to overcome, which can be both rewarding and positive.
References
ACAS.
(2014, March). Managing Conflict at Work.
Retrieved from http://www.acas.org.uk/media/pdf/d/m/Managing-conflict-at-work-advisory-booklet.pdf
Arslan,
C. (2010). An Investigation of Anger and Anger Expression in Terms of Coping
with Stress and Interpersonal Problem-Solving. Educational Sciences: Theory and Practice, 10(1), 25-43.
Cahn,
D. D., & Abigail, R. A. (2014). Managing Conflict through Communication
(5th Ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson Education, Inc.
Mostenska,
T., & Ralko, O. (2014). Conflicts in Organizations: Features of Corporate
Conflicts Management. Transformations in
Business and Economics, 13(2), 220-235.
Paleari,
F. G., Regalia, C., & Fincham, F. D. (2010). Forgiveness and Conflict
Resolution in Close Relationships: Within and Cross Partner Effects. Universitas Psychologica, 9(1), 35-56.
Todorova,
G., Bear, J. B., & Weingart, L. R. (2014). Can Conflict be Energizing? A
Study of Task Conflict, Positive Emotions, and Job Satisfaction. Journal of
Applied Psychology, 99(3), 451-467. doi:10.1037/a0035134
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