Managing Conflict
The Impact of Interpersonal Conflict on Team Performance
Conflict can have damaging or productive effects on the performance of a team.
Learning Objectives: Analyze how conflict can both help and hurt a team's performance
Key Points
- Conflict is common within teams, especially during the storming phase of team development.
- Team conflict provides benefits, including resolving misunderstandings, improving processes, and changing behaviors.
- Team conflict can have negative consequences such as reduced group cohesion and lower productivity, and it can even threaten the team's existence.
Key Terms
- Interdependent: Mutually dependent; reliant on one another.
- Affective: Relating to, resulting from, or influenced by emotions.
Conflict often occurs in teamwork, especially during the brainstorming phase of team development. While at first, we may think that all conflict among team members is undesirable and harmful, resolving conflicts can benefit team performance. Whether a conflict is productive or not depends on how team members perceive it and how it affects progress toward the team's goals.
Benefits of Team Conflict
Substantive conflicts can affect performance for the better by removing barriers caused by different assumptions or misunderstandings about a team's tasks, strategy, or goals. Conflict can be constructive when it creates broader awareness about how team members are experiencing their work, leading to changes that improve members' productivity. Conflict can also lead to process improvements, such as when it reveals a deficiency in how the team communicates, which can then be corrected. Clashes of ideas can lead to more creative solutions or otherwise provide perspectives that persuade the team to take a different approach that is more likely to lead to success.
Addressing personal conflicts that arise among members can facilitate cooperation by helping individuals adapt their behavior to better suit others' needs. Although most people find conflict uncomfortable while experiencing it, they can recognize its value as the team progresses in its development.
Negative Consequences of Team Conflict
While conflict can lead to a solution to a problem, conflicts can also create problems. Discord caused by enmity among individuals can reduce team cohesion and the ability of team members to work together. Conflicts can create distractions that require time and effort to resolve, delaying task completion and putting the team's goals at risk.
Communication suffers when people withdraw their attention or participation, leading to poor coordination of interdependent tasks. Tension and heightened emotions can lower team members' satisfaction, increase frustration, and lead to bad judgments. This conflict can cause individuals to withdraw from the team, requiring the assignment of a new member or creating a resource scarcity that makes it more difficult for the team to fulfill its purpose. In extreme cases, conflict among members, if left unaddressed, can lead to the team's complete inability to function and to its disbandment.
Common Causes of Team Conflict
Team conflict is caused by factors related to individual behavior and disagreements about the team's work.
Learning Objectives: Identify the causes of conflict within an organization as a conflict manager.
Key Points
- Team conflict arises from how people perceive others' actions and from differing views of the team's work and how it should be accomplished.
- Common causes of team conflict include conflicting interests, incompatible work styles, competition over resources, failure to follow norms, poor communication, and performance deficiencies.
Key Terms
- Ambiguity: Something liable to more than one interpretation, explanation, or meaning.
- Affective: Relating to, resulting from, or influenced by emotions.
Conflict among team members comes from several sources. Some conflicts are based on how people behave. Others arise from disagreements about the nature of the team's work and how it is being accomplished.
Competing interests: Conflict can arise when people have mutually-incompatible desires or needs. For example, two team members with similar skills may both want a certain assignment. The person who does not receive it can be resentful toward the other.
Different behavioral styles or preferences: Individuals may clash over their respective work habits, attention to detail, communication practices, or tone of expression. While these differences can affect the coordination of interdependent tasks, they can also inhibit direct collaboration.
Competition over resources: Members may fight over the limited resources available to accomplish the team's tasks. For example, if two people both rely on the action of a third person to meet identical deadlines, disagreements might arise over whose work should receive that person's attention first.
Failure to follow team norms: A team member creates conflict when they display attitudes or behaviors that go against the team's agreement about how it will function. If a group norm calls for prompt arrival at meetings and prohibits mobile devices during discussions, ignoring these practices can cause conflict.
Performance deficiencies: When some team members do not contribute their share of effort or do not perform at the expected level of quality, these impositions can cause friction, which may be heightened when critical or highly visible tasks are involved.
Poor communication: When team members do not share relevant information, they may make decisions or take actions that others consider inappropriate or even harmful. Blame and questions about motives can result, creating discord among the team.
Ambiguity about means and ends: Lack of clarity about tasks, strategies, and/or goals can lead people to make assumptions that others do not share or agree with, which can result in conflict.
Constructive Team Conflict
Teams can use conflict as a strategy for enhancing performance.
Learning Objectives: Explain how conflict can be used as a strategy for improving team performance.
Key Points
- Team performance can benefit from using conflict to foster learning and process improvement.
- Team members can establish guidelines and norms that encourage constructive conflict.
Key Terms
- Innovation: A change in customs, something new and contrary to established patterns, manners, or rites.
- Conflict: A clash or disagreement between two opposing groups or individuals.
Teams may use conflict as a strategy for continuous improvement and learning. Recognizing the benefits of conflict and using them as part of the team's process can enhance team performance. Conflict can uncover barriers to collaboration that changes in behavior can remove. It can also foster better decisions because it makes team members consider others' perspectives and even helps them see things in new and innovative ways.
Addressing conflict can increase team cohesion by engaging members in discussions about important issues. Team members may feel more valued when they know they are contributing to something vital to the team's success. Conflict can reveal assumptions that may not apply in the current situation and thus allow the team to agree on a new course. It can also draw attention to norms that have developed without the explicit agreement of team members and create the opportunity to endorse or discard them.
Generating Constructive Conflict
Team members and others can follow a few guidelines for encouraging constructive conflict. First, they can start by explicitly calling for it as something that will help improve the team's performance. This helps people view conflict as acceptable and can thus free them to speak up.
Teams can lower the emotional intensity of any conflict by establishing clear guidelines for how to express disagreements and challenge colleagues. One helpful norm is to focus on the task-related element of a conflict rather than criticizing the traits of particular individuals. Another is to emphasize common goals and shared commitments, keeping the conflict in perspective, and preventing it from overwhelming the team's efforts.
Team Conflict Resolution and Management
Some ways of dealing with conflict seek resolution; others aim to minimize negative effects on the team.
Learning Objectives: Differentiate between conflict resolution and conflict management
Key Points
- Conflict resolution aims to eliminate disagreements and disputes among team members; in contrast, conflict management seeks to minimize conflict's negative effects on team performance.
- There are three main approaches to conflict resolution: integrative, distributive, and mediating.
- There are three main conflict-management tactics: smoothing, yielding, and avoiding.
Key Terms
- Dispute: An argument or disagreement.
- Resolution: The moment in which a conflict ends and the outcome is clear.
- Adversarial: Characteristic of an opponent; combative, hostile.
The way a team deals with conflicts that arise among members can influence whether and how those conflicts are resolved and, as a result, the team's subsequent performance. There are several ways to approach managing and resolving team conflict – some leave the team and its members better able to continue their work, while others can undermine its effectiveness as a performing unit.
Conflict Resolution
Teams use one of three primary approaches to conflict resolution: integrative, distributive, and mediating.
Integrative approaches focus on the issue to be solved and aim to find a resolution that meets everyone's needs. Success with this tactic requires the exchange of information, openness to alternatives, and a willingness to consider what is best for the group as a whole rather than for any particular individual.
Distributive approaches find ways to divide a fixed number of positive outcomes or resources in which one side comes out ahead of the other. Since team members have repeated interactions with each other and are committed to shared goals, the expectation of reciprocity can make this solution acceptable since those who don't get their way today may end up "winning" tomorrow.
Mediating approaches bring in a third party to facilitate a non-confrontational, non-adversarial discussion with the goal of helping the team reach a consensus about how to resolve the conflict. A mediator from outside the team brings no emotional ties or preconceived ideas to the conflict and therefore can help the team identify a broader set of solutions that would be satisfactory to all.
Although these three approaches all bring overt conflict to an end, team cohesion can suffer if members perceive the process itself as unfair, disrespectful, or overly contentious. The result can be resentment that festers and leads to subsequent additional conflict that a more conciliatory process might have avoided.
Conflict Management
The primary aim of conflict management is to promote the positive effects and reduce the negative effects that disputes can have on team performance without necessarily fully resolving the conflict itself. Teams use one of three main tactics to manage conflict: smoothing, yielding, and avoiding.
The smoothing approach attempts to minimize the differences among the people who are in conflict with each other. This strategy often focuses on reducing the emotional charge and intensity of how the people speak to each other by emphasizing their shared goals and commitments.
The yielding approach describes the choice some team members make to simply give in when others disagree with them rather than engage in conflict. This is more common when the stakes are perceived to be small or when the team member's emotional ties to the issue at hand are not particularly strong.
In the avoiding approach, team members may choose to simply ignore all but the most contentious disagreements. While this can have short-term benefits and may be the best option when the team is under time pressure, it is the approach least likely to produce a sense of harmony among the team.
While conflict can increase the engagement of team members, it can also create distractions and draw attention away from important tasks. Because conflict management seeks to contain such disruptions and threats to team performance, conflicts do not disappear as long as it exists alongside teamwork.
Source: Boundless
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