Suggestions to conflict resolutions.

Essay by hongmeiCollege, Undergraduate September 2003

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Since organizational conflict can affect organizations' cultrue, it's important to manage and resolve them. Organiations should implement conflict resolition approaches to reduce or to stop the conflicts.

Kenneth Thomas (1976) distinguished five conflict resolution methods - competing/forcing, avoiding, compromising, accommodating, and collaborating. These approaches are based on how assertive or unassertive each party is in puruing its own concerns and how cooperative or uncooperative each party is in satisfying the concerns of the others.

Competing/forcing approach is used on issues vital to an organization's welfare an dwhere unpopular actions need to be implemented. Avoiding can ca used when the issue is trivial or when you perceive that there's no chance of satisfying your concerns.

Compromising becomes handy when the goals are important, but not worth the effort or potential disruption of more assertive modes. It can also act as a backup incase collaboration or competition failed. Other than this, it can also be used to achieve temporary settlement to complex issues.

When issues are more important to others than yourself and you need to build social credits for later issues and to minimize loss when you are outmatched and losing, it is more appropriate tp use accommodating approaches. However, when you need to find an integrative solution when both sets of concerns are too important to be compromised and you need to gain commitment by incorporating concerns into a consensus, it is best to use the collaborating approach.

Other than those, altering the level of differentiation and integration to change task relationships can resolve conflict. An organization might change from a functional structure to a product division structure in order to remove a source of conflict between manufacturing managers who are unable to to control the over head costs associated with different kinds of products. If product managers find...