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I would say there's two clear signs that would indicate when a conflict is
about to become a negative conflict for the team or for the business.
The first sign that a conflict is going to become a negative force in your team,
is if the emotions are starting to escalate.
If people are getting angry or if they're getting upset.
This is a sign that the conflict is going to become personal,
is going to become distracting from task performance.
The second sign that a conflict is going to be destructive for a team, is that
people are fighting about things that they actually don't really care about or
shouldn't be that important.
So, if your fighting about something very silly about what time to meet or
who's gonna do what.
Often these types of conflicts are venues for people to fight about bigger issues.
Be it status concerns, leadership issues, questions of respect.
If you're fighting about something that you just doesn't make sense,
why this is such a big issue, that often means that your team is in trouble and
this is a destructive conflict.
And they need to take a step back to figure out, what the real issues are and
go from there.
[MUSIC]
Conflicts generally start with one person who's listening to a group discussion and
thinks gee, I really don't agree with what is being said here.
I should say something.
So, the person expresses conflict, and the other people on the team have
the choice to reflect on that and to offer feedback to agree or disagree.
Generally, one person will offer feedback to what the person says, so you think we
should take strategy x, well actually I think we should take strategy y.
At this point you have an interpersonal conflict between two people on the team.
The other five team members could be sitting there watching and
deciding whether or not they should choose to engage or not.
Conflicts at this stage generally are the most positive for
team performance, because the two people engaging,
are engaging because of authentic interest in the issue, and
differences in opinion are information and they need to be reconciled.
However, as the conflict starts to escalate and
to grow and to involve more members, members may not always join.
For reasons due to the, the question being fought about,
they could join because they get emotional,
if people are starting to yell or get angry and they also get emotional.
Could also be that they're helping political alliances their boss, or
their friend or someone they're close to is involved in the conflict, and
they feel they may need to join to support them.
This is a second phase of conflict and where subgroups start to form.
And when the subgroup's involved in a conflict, again it intensifies, it
escalates, it's more likely to become more personal and destructive than the initial
conflict between the two people, who had just different pieces of information.
And as these subgroups start to fight with one another over time,
any remaining members that weren't involved in the conflict have no choice.
They're going to be sucked in as well and then you have a true team brawl,
which is not going to be a good thing for team performance.
[MUSIC]
If a manager detects a conflict in the team, the first thing the manager should
do is to identify what's being discussed and who's involved and why.
So, if he sees two members, or she sees two members discussing an issue that's
very related to the task and the members seem to be engaging in this debate.
Because they want to make the team better.
As a manager, this is a conflict that you should allow to go out.
Just let it play out and to see where they come to in this conflict.
However, if the manager knows that the conflict is personal or emotional or
it's about issues that are not so important, such as about the process,
this is a conflict that you should cut off and try to resolve offline.
Talk to the members individually, try to get them on the same page again.
So that would be the first step, is to understand what they're fighting about,
what their motivations are, and then to deal with that.
[MUSIC]
So, task conflicts are, again, the most productive form of conflict in teams.
And there's three other forms of conflict that can occur in teams and
are generally likely to hurt team performance.
These three destructive types of conflict in teams are process conflicts,
relationship conflicts, and status conflicts.
Process conflicts are conflicts about a logistics, of day to day working themes.
Of what time we're gonna meet,
who's gonna do what, what responsibilities each person should have.
These conflicts interestingly have been shown to be the most negative form of
conflict that can occur in teams.
The reason being is that these conflicts often represent underlying issues
in the team.
That if you're gonna fight about roles and
responsibilities, it's often because you care about your status or
your prestige in the team, but you're unwilling to say that.
So, then you choose indirectly to choose the best responsibility for
yourself to gain prestige over your teammates.
This makes these types of conflicts particularly dangerous.
Relationship conflicts are another negative form of conflict in teams.
Relationship conflicts about personality clashes,
differences in political beliefs, people who just don't get along.
These conflicts have always shown to be negative for
team performance and are best avoided if you can.
The last type of conflict,
that's been more recently pointed out in the literature, is status conflicts, or
conflicts about the relative respect the people have for
on another within the team.
About the hierarchy, about the rank order.
These types of conflicts are especially prevalent in higher level teams in
the organizations.
There are teams where people really care about stages in power.
Some management teams, boards of directors, et cetera.
This conflicts are particularly difficult to work with and
often negative performance because people often don't voice them directly.
As indirect behaviors, it's engaging in process conflicts to claim a choice
responsibility to improve your status, as a gauge in a relationship conflicts to
derogate somebody to again prove, improve your own position.
And because status conflicts are so
insidious, they're very difficult to catch and very difficult to resolve.
And so, if there's any way to get the team on the same page to avoid status issues in
the first place, a manager will be well advised to do that.
[MUSIC]
One of the solutions in the literature that's been looked at then is,
how do you help virtual teams?
Given that virtual teams have more issues with conflict than face to face teams.
And one main solution is to make sure that you have a face to face kick off,
when you start working together with a virtual team.
This is really critical,
to give team members a few days together to get to know one another.
So, they have a context and
an understanding of the relationship and of the person.
In case they do have a conflict over email or
over the phone, they know how to make sense of it and
to make the right attributions, rather than taking things personally.
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If conflict isn't managed and isn't dealt with, and
it transforms into a negative form of conflict, be it process conflict,
relationship conflict, status conflict, it can tear a team to pieces.
There's been research that shows that conflict leads to
psychosomatic complaints.
People get burnout, they get depressed, they leave the company, and
the teams eventually can dissolve.
So, the dangers of not resolving conflicts are huge.
It's something managers really do need to take seriously in the daily life of their
teams is to monitor their conflicts and prevent them from getting to that point.
[MUSIC]
My top three tips for managing conflict in an organization include.
Knowing what people are fighting about, why they're fighting, and
at what are their emotions while they're fighting.
So, to discuss each of these three points in a little bit more detail,
first understand what they're fighting about, what's the topic of the conflict?
Is it about the goals of the team?
Or is it about something that's not likely to help your team so much, such as
questions of logistics, interpersonal tensions, status concerns, et cetera?
So recognize what the topic of the conflict is and make choices accordingly.
Secondly, understand the motivations of why people are engaged in a conflict.
Is what they're fighting about the real issue?
Are there issues under the surface the people are trying to indirectly raise in
another manner?
Such as, you know, are they engaging in a process conflict about what time to meet,
as a way to further their own status position in the team?
And to have strategies ready to resolve these underlying issues.
So, recognize why they're engaging, and make sure you deal with the conflict,
at that level, rather than, necessarily, at the surface level.
Finally, to look at the emotions.
And to monitor the emotions carefully during conflicts, the minute that
members start to become emotional, to be upset, to raise their voices.
This conflict is no longer gonna be good for performance and the team needs to take
a break, you need to step in to resolve it one on one with members individually, or
find a way out of the situation before it escalates out of control.
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