Organizations comprise people from different cultural, professional, racial, age, and other demographic backgrounds. Where people are segregated along these diversity differences, cultural conflicts arise. This suggests that managers and leaders within organizations encounter immense challenges in seeking effective strategies for recruitment, training, developing, and retaining the most talented personnel in an organization characterized by immense workforce diversities. Conflicts often produce a negative implication on the performance of an organization. Since the principal goal of organizational leadership is to look for mechanisms of resolving challenges, which may hinder the performance of an organization so that it delivers value to its owners (shareholders), conflict avoidance constitutes a risky approach to conflict management. These challenges become even more pronounced as many organizations endeavor to engage in global businesses as a measure of increasing their competitive advantage. The more diverse the workforce is, the higher the risks of workplace conflicts associated with diversity differences. However, organizations gain from higher workforce innovation and creativity potential upon adopting effective strategies for handling this diversity. The inevitability of conflicts within an organization suggests that organizational leaders need to embrace them rather than avoid them. Thus, although there are many ways of dealing with conflicts at workplaces, such as collaboration, compromise, competing, avoidance, and accommodation, any strategy that emphasizes leaving conflicts unaddressed is inappropriate.
Defining Workplace Conflicts
In a healthy organization, conflicts are predictable. Workplaces bring people from different cultural backgrounds. Such people have different opinions and views towards various issues encountered in an organization’s daily activities. Such different opinions and views create points of parity and disparity. The disparities lead to conflicts. Workplace conflict is defined as the issues that generate frequent expressions of emotions, frustration, and anger. This suggests that whenever two or more people work together, they disagree on strategies for accomplishing some desired outcomes. Such disagreements can be either constructive or destructive in an organization. In fact, destructive conflicts referred as ugly clashes, while constructive disagreements are good organizational conflicts. While it is impossible to eliminate workplace conflicts, destructive conflicts are highly undesirable. They should be kept at minimal levels.
Organizations, individuals, and even work teams require constructive conflict for them to grow. Engaging in opposing discussions, especially on mechanisms of accomplishing certain outcomes, creates opportunities for thinking and doing things that can be useful to everyone. In this sense, the outcomes of decisions made following engagements in constructive conflicts are in favor and accommodative of all key stakeholders’ interests within an organization. Destructive conflicts make people in an organization uncomfortable.
In some situations, escalated conflicts have the implication of compelling people to quit. Organizations that experience destructive conflicts also encounter challenges of lower morale, lower productivity, higher turnover, and more employee burnout. This suggests that organizational leaders and managers should focus on eliminating destructive conflicts while encouraging constructive conflicts in an effort to build higher-performing organizations.
Causes of Conflicts in the Workplace
Workplace conflicts are broadly subdivided into caustic and productive conflicts. Destructive conflicts often involve personality clashes. This occurs when people fail to get along with one another. This type of conflict in the workplace is often fueled by emotion and perceptions about somebody else’s motives and character. For example, a team leader jumps on someone for being late because they view the team member as lazy and disrespectful. The team member sees the team leader as out to ‘get’ them because they are not one of the ‘favored children.’ The second type occurs when people view decisions and ideas articulated to a given job or task differently. Conflicting ideas become productive in the event that parties in conflicts have the willingness to engage in brainstorming sessions. In such situations, compromised ideas are, at times, better in enhancing the success of an organization compared to an original idea.
As a cause of workplace conflicts, as hinted above, personality clashes initiate disputes regarding certain business practices, which then skyrocket into mutual loathing. In some cases, two people may not like each other right from the beginning due to diversity differences and other personality differences. This claim implies that workplace diversity may be a big contributor to conflicts within an organization. Personality clashes also contribute to workplace disputes, which may escalate to become conflicts since people possess different beliefs, values, and approaches to handling problems. When people fail or have difficulties in appreciating and embracing other people’s work methods, clashes emerge.
Some conflicts within an organization can emerge due to a lack of trust in the HR to handle differences between two disagreeing employees. The situation makes the parties engaged in conflict expand their differences when permitted to take matters into their hands. Therefore, HRM deserves to evaluate the circumstances that may cause disregard the consideration of the roles of HRM in conflict resolution by employees. Interpersonal skills are important to managers with regard to building workplace trust and cooperation from staff members who are collectively accountable for furthering business goals. In fact, one of the roles of management in an organization is to ensure a peaceful environment characterized by workforce collaboration in the effort to meet an organization’s goals, mission, and aims.
Failure of employee collaboration may give rise to workplace conflicts. Other causes of conflicts within workplaces include poor or inadequate communication, which gives rise to misunderstandings, and limited organizational resources, which lead to competition and conflicting needs. Poor performance in tasks that are allocated to employees may also lead to conflicts when some tasks with higher effort input demands or when poorly completed tasks are reallocated to other employees.
Globalized organizations embrace diversity in their workforce. This strategic initiative is impaired by the belief that employing people from diverse backgrounds gives an organization a competitive advantage. For instance, an organization develops the capacity to tap and benefit from a wide range of talents and knowledge bases. This means that an organization is able to innovate and create a wide range of products, which translates into increased profitability while traded in the global markets. Focusing on diversity as a strategic initiative for an organization delivers gains in terms of enhanced growth through an increment of product range due to innovation that is brought by people possessing different capabilities working together. However, it is crucial to note that diversity also brings together people from different cultural backgrounds.
The above assertion implies that diversity has the impact of creating cultural conflicts in workplaces. Institute of Leadership and Management (2007) confirms how the HRM is important in resolving such conflicts since it helps to create a common organizational culture by helping employees understand that different people have different abilities and beliefs and that these differences should not be permitted to influence the way people relate with one another. Alternatively, diversity differences need to avoid personality clashes within workplaces. The HR, being charged with ensuring that employees work in harmony without conflicting situations that lead to personality clashes, should deploy diversity to enhance success by treating any conflict arising from cultural differences and frictions as an act of indiscipline and negligence to comply with an established organizational culture.
While this role may be well established in the outline of the mandates of the HRM in an organization, communication may hinder the success of the initiatives deployed by HR to curb personality conflicts. Communication is often identified as a major cause of workplace conflicts. Leaders for dynamic organizations appreciate the importance of effective communication, particularly while working in an environment of consistent change. Communication has the ability to deliver tangible products as opposed to being a soft component of leadership roles. Improving the satisfaction of consumers, enhancing the quality of service delivery and product quality, and enhancing retention together with the satisfaction of employees depend on effective communication. These aspects also constitute the ingredients of workplace conflicts.
In an organization that employs people from diverse backgrounds, communication is the tool deployed to harness individual differences of employees to align them to a common organizational culture guided by the aims, missions, goals, and objectives of the organization. This suggests that communication is also important in the effective resolution of employee conflicts. Conflicts influence employee productivity. Hence, the performance of an organization is also affected negatively.
Poor communication often results in resistance to change, especially where the persons working in an organization consider the changes being implemented as threats to their jobs and personal excellence. For instance, while personnel at the headquarters of an organization may be fighting for standardization of products produced by an organization to ease supply chain and logistics challenges, workers at departmental levels of various products may be opposed to such an endeavor. This disparity creates destructive workplace conflicts between an organization and employees at different hierarchical levels. Inadequate communication at the intra-organizational levels may result in different perceptions of ideas and strategies that will enhance organizational success in the market. This claim implies that conflicts in ideology minimize the opportunities for channeling organizational energy to the implementation of ideas and strategies that will enhance the increment of productivity of an organization.
Communicating both adequately and effectively is crucial for the elimination of workplace conflicts. Institute of Leadership and Management (2007) confirms that the availability of adequate and unambiguous information helps employees to collectively support effectively while doing what is within their capacity to ensure that an organization succeeds in the direction set by leaders and managers. In this sense, the goal of an effective communication program within an organization is to foster a change in employees’ behaviors and perceptions toward other employees, which may trigger personality clashes. Effecting the desired change in an organization through communication takes different forms. It may involve the harmonization of people’s attitudes or alteration of work processes in an effort to support the organization’s success by eliminating the clash of ideas in the manner of executing various job elements, which may be destructive.
Effective communication entails communicating strategies for success through translating the essential business objectives and goals into terms that employees can understand easily. In response to such communication, employees become engaged and aligned in readiness to work collectively toward driving organizational success. In fact, when communication fails, misunderstanding arises, resulting in the failure of employees to execute tasks as desired by managers and leaders. This translates into workplace conflicts between managers, supervisors, and leaders with employees.
Impacts of Workplace Conflict
The human resource arm of an organization has an immense responsibility to ensure that top talent within an organization is retained. HRM is the core competency of an organization whose objective is to handle issues related to employees. Such issues include enhancing motivation, enhancing job satisfaction, laying remuneration structures, giving advice on promotions, and aiding an organization to acquire top talent through selection and recruitment. Addressing issues that result in poor performance of employees, such as poor job satisfaction, calls for the HRM to establish correlations for the challenges. Ugly workplace conflicts always become one of the correlates of poor job satisfaction.
As a core competency for an organization, HRM engages in tasks such as training and development and managing conflicts within organizations through conflict resolution. Conflicts that HRM enhances their management are between an organization and employees or between employees and other employees. These conflicts produce both positive and negative impacts on an organization. Conflicts may have the impact of creating opportunities for organizational growth. A good organizational conflict entails providing the means for learning and setting mechanisms for fostering employee cooperation. Conflicts may create an opportunity for employees to learn strategies for effectively handling similar conflicts in the future.
While workplace conflicts may emanate from poor communication, conflicts can provide a means through which people become aware and/or understand the various issues that may translate into future conflicts. Through this understanding, people are able to develop honesty and transparent organizational communication channels. Different ideas and angles of view on a given issue that may be influencing an organization have the impact of creating well-brainstormed ideas, which aid an organization in achieving better performance levels. Organizational performance is a function of many variables. Some of these variables are workforce morale, employee turnover rates, productivity, and employee burnout. These variables correlate directly with workplace conflicts.
As revealed before, one of the common causes of workplace conflicts is workforce diversity, especially in terms of professional capabilities and cultural differences. This assertion implies that effective management of workforce diversity can improve workforce productivity, enhance workforce engagement, and foster the reduction of staff absenteeism and workforce turnover.
HRM plays a central role in handling all issues negatively influencing employees’ productivity in the workplace. In case of ugly conflicts, diversity implies leading to conflicts, which impair employees’ productivity by lowering their work morale. However, an organization will benefit if good organizational conflicts arise from diversity differences. In this context, it is inferable that proper management of good organizational conflicts involving exchange and disagreement on various ideas akin to diversity differences in talent and creativity levels has positive impacts. For instance, the creativity and innovativeness of a diverse workforce have made Google gain via establishing a central position in the competitive market.
The goal of managing workforce conflicts is to ensure that conflicts do not negatively impact organizations’ success. Labor turnover constitutes one of the negative impacts of workplace conflicts. In many organizations, labor turnover is deployed as a measure of performance. It measures the decisions of the worker to remain committed to the work of an organization. Employee turnover is divided into two main types: voluntary and involuntary turnover. Voluntary turnover occurs when employees decide to quit employment out of their own will to engage in other activities, such as self-employment, but not because the job was dissatisfying. In the case of involuntary turnover, people are compelled by circumstances to quit their employment. Such circumstances include poor pay, perception of exploitation, conflicts with other employees, and work-personal life conflicts, among other reasons.
Labor turnover is controllable or unavoidable in some situations. For instance, where workplace conflicts cause labor turnover, proper management of such conflicts can control and avoid them. Where this does not happen, the impacts of labor turnover due to destructive workplace conflicts have serious consequences on the performance of an organization both in the short and long term. High turnover in organizations leads to increased costs of recruitment together with training of new employees to fill the gap left by the outgoing employees. Turnover is one of the issues that organizations seeking to exploit cost competitiveness as a strategy of success should address proactively. Addressing it proactively calls for organizations to deal with its causation, such as workplace conflicts.
The best approach to the management of organizational conflicts encompasses developing strategies for their prevention. However, the occurrence of conflicts indicates potential problems that negatively impact employees’ productivity, such as low motivation. They also create opportunities for establishing good relationships among work teams and individuals when arbitration, mediation, and reconciliation efforts succeed. Considering that good relationship among employees is the foundation for higher work team productivity, mild destructive workplace conflicts in this sense can help build better-performing work teams.
Handling Conflicts in the Workplace
In practice, employees are not able to handle misunderstandings with their peers in an effective way before such misunderstandings have translated to personality clashes. The realization of this argument calls for the management to step in to look for mechanisms for handling conflicts. One such mechanism is adopting disciplinary measures for employees engaging in unproductive conflicts. However, intra-communication and inter-communication strategies are vital before disciplinary action is adopted. This move calls for HR managers to possess good interpersonal and intrapersonal communication skills. These skills are deployed to help harness employees’ personal and social skills that are necessary for conflict resolution. Indeed, interpersonal communication comprises an essential skill in conflict management within an organization in the effort to diffuse various stressful environments together with hostile situations, which may create fertile grounds for the development of conflicts.
In organizational settings, the emergence of conflicts is hard to prevent. The main challenge is how to resolve workplace conflicts. To reduce incidences of defiant behaviors, effective management of employees entails effectively communicating the rules and procedures of punishing employees in case of breach of the established rules and regulations that define the codes of ethics and organizational culture. Since any grievances and disciplinary actions within an organization begin with clear and precise communication of the implications of an employee’s acts of misconduct, interpersonal and intrapersonal communication skills are an important requirement for a manager who endeavors to prepare, conduct, and conclude grievance and disciplinary cases effectively.
Scholars have developed many models to describe various mechanisms of resolving conflicts within an organization. Thomas-Kilmann proposed one such model. According to his model, conflicts can be handled using five main styles: accommodating, shunning, working together, rivalry, and compromising. Accommodation involves the decision by an organization to cooperate with parties in conflict to the highest possible degree. Often, one party works against its desired goals and/or outcomes. The strategy works well when one party in conflict has a better solution to a given problem. It helps in building strong ties between two or more parties in conflict. Alternatively, one may choose to ignore the need to resolve a given conflict. This approach entails the resolution of conflicts by avoiding them. This style works well when the effective solution is costly, when one perceives that he or she has minimal probabilities for winning, or when an issue in conflict is trivial. However, avoiding is not an effective strategy in the long term. The collaboration includes partnering to follow a goal that another party pursues. During the collaboration, an effort is made to accommodate all people’s ideas for synthesis to develop a single superior idea for resolving a conflict. Such an idea also needs to consider all points of agreement and disagreement between the collaborating parties. This way, it becomes possible to break away from the win-lose strategy to explore the win-win strategy. This approach requires an incredibly high capacity to trust one another in the development of a superior idea for the resolution of a conflict. The approach is opposed to the competing technique in which the focus is on the win-lose approach to conflict resolution. Competing approaches work well in times of dire need to make quick decisions. In the case of compromising, parties in conflict focus on a lose-lose strategy. The approach is best suited whenever parties in conflict pursue goals and objectives that cannot converge.
Managers should engage in communication with employees and other organizational stakeholders for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is attributed to the expensiveness of ineffective communication in an organization. In modern workplaces, communication in management is important since workplace environments continue to be sophisticated. They also involve complex interaction processes among all individual units that make the whole organization. Consequently, collaboration capability enables an organization to gain from a diverse creative workforce that requires ardent and unambiguous communication. This way, it becomes possible to handle workplace conflicts that are attributed to poor and inadequate communication.
Upon establishing the issues that attract conflicts between various employees and/or an organization, the focus shifts to establishing mechanisms of healing the wounds caused by a conflict. In this process reconciliation, arbitration, and mediation as important techniques for handling workplace conflicts. Reconciliation involves the admission of wrongdoing followed by forgiveness. Mediation involves bringing two parties in conflict together through a third party by revisiting the series of events or disputes that led to the conflict. This step is then followed by suggesting codes of behavior or reactions that should have prevented the conflict. In each case, the parties in conflict identify their own mistakes and put effort into ensuring they would not repeat the same mistakes in future workplace interaction processes. Arbitration through a third non-partisan party, including a court, becomes important where conflicts have translated to personal injuries and/or paying off damages is necessary.