Organizational Conflict at Your Workplace

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Functions of Conflict

If people feel negatively toward conflict, why do you think they still engage in so much conflict? They do so because conflict serves important functions for individuals and relationships. Most obviously, individuals engage in conflict to get what they want. But sometimes they continue to argue even when the other person has given in. They also fight about trivial issues and matters that they don't really care about. They behave in this way because conflict interactions serve a variety of functions in addition to solving problems. One function of conflict is that conflict can help individuals regulate their relationships, emotions, and lives. While conflict is often considered only from a destructive context, conflict can and does have constructive functions.

Here are some of the constructive functions of conflict:

Conflict Is Persuasive

Most obviously, conflict serves as a type of persuasive discourse; you have arguments when others interfere with your ability to achieve your goals. You engage in conflict in an attempt to persuade them to stop interfering and allow you to fulfill your desires. If your colleague insists on smoking in your office and you don't smoke, you may engage in conflict in an attempt to persuade him or her to quit. As you have seen in the examples, most conflicts are attempts to influence others.

Conflict Helps You Regulate Your Relationships

Another function of conflict is to help people manage their relationships. Routinely, family members, friends, lovers, and colleagues have to regulate issues of power and control, intimacy and distance, and novelty and predictability. Whenever people begin to feel they have too little power or too much responsibility, too much distance or closeness, or too much predictability or unpredictability in their relationships, they experience dissatisfaction. They may attempt to redress their dissatisfaction by engaging in conflict that is hopefully constructive and not destructive to the relationships.

For example, if you find that your supervisor has changed your work hours without consulting you, you may resent having no control over the decision, even if the hours are no less convenient. In order to reestablish your control in the relationship, you may decide to engage in conflict.

Adolescents typically experience many such conflicts with their parents as a way to establish more independence and control (Valiyamattam & Gopal, 2013). Similarly, you may feel distant or disconnected from your friends or loved ones at times so you initiate conflict as a way to pull them back into the relationship. Through airing grievances and, more importantly, making up after the argument, you may begin to feel closer to one another. However, people rarely do this consciously and it is not always effective. Unfortunately, sometimes the conflict can spin out of control leading to the destruction of closeness instead of increasing it.

Conflict Is Cathartic

Conflict can also function as a catharsis for people. The word “catharsis” comes from the Greek term meaning ”to cleanse.” People often try to avoid conflicts with other people only to discover that they have really just been delaying conflicts. They become tense or irritated and find that they have to confront whatever is bothering them. After they talk with the other people, they may feel much better just to have “gotten it out in the open,” even if the issue itself is not resolved. In this way, they feel cleansed of their bad feelings and the conflict may appear to have constructive merits. However, if the conflict is managed poorly, the participants may end up feeling worse rather than better. Then, this is where the conflict may turn destructive.

Conflict Can Help You Clarify Issues

Conflict interactions also help people clarify how they feel and what they want. For example, when you enter an argument, you may think you are upset about one issue—that your colleague is always late. Once you begin to discuss the issue, however, you may discover that you are actually upset because you believe your colleague does not value you and your time. In this way, engaging in conflict with other people can help make your concerns and needs clearer, both to you and others.

However, realizing that your purposes for engaging in conflict may not always be clear to you and any specific argument may serve more than one purpose is important. Nonetheless, the next time you engage in a conflict, you may find thinking along the following lines useful:

• Why are you having the argument?
• Why are you having it at this time?

This awareness may help you understand the underlying reasons you are in conflict and perhaps put the conflict in perspective.

Reference:

Valiyamattam, G. J., & Gopal, D. V. V. (2013). Impact of the level of parental education on adolescent adjustment: A cross sectional study. Indian Journal of Health and Wellbeing, 4(1), 10–15.