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I remembered working about five years ago, for a supervisor when I was an hourly employee in my organization. I was also in the Army National Guard, where I was doing a weekend a month and two weeks a year. Sometimes my commander would like for soldiers to come early and prepare for the weekend. I would leave on the shortest notice from my job and come back to work on Monday with orders justifying my absence for that Friday. The issue of not coming to work, because of my military duty led to the most significant conflict in my work environment. My supervisor and the human resources department gave me a tough time. The supervisor took away my vacation privileges and slander me to upper management. He made me look so bad that my work environment became hostile. I couldn’t perform my job and I feel at that moment that my career was at a dead end. The conflict eventually escalated to the point where I had an argument with my supervisor and another member of management. To solve the conflict, I called the military hotline and told them that my employer was discriminating against me for going to military duty. The main cause of this conflict was due to “authority relationships”. My supervisor wanted to be the only boss to tell me what to do and this caused authority issues. I knew that being angry wasn’t going to help with the situation. According to McClure, anger interferes with teamwork and productivity on the job, therefore causing a hostile and frightening workplace (McClure, 2000, p. 1).

      I did have a functional conflict in the workplace between myself and another member of my organization. The conflict turned out to be a healthy and constructive disagreement. We were able to create a new idea that would’ve save the organization a lot of man hours and improve schedule on a project. Table 13.1 (Consequences of Conflict) shows that there are positive and negative consequences that can occur (Nelson & Quick, 2016, p. 473). The positive consequences of conflict that I’ve experienced in my workplace the most is motivating change and stimulating creativity. I’ve noticed that change usually comes out of either a functional or dysfunctional conflict. The conflict that occurred in the functional conflict was caused by “specialization”. The job was highly specialized and required skills from an employee that have been with the company for a long time. The older employee wanted to control the job and tell me that we are going to do the job his way. After hours of struggling with the job, we had a conflict that contributed to a new idea. That idea helped move the job along. “Work groups must make decisions about the allocation of resources, the relative priority of goals, and the various means for reaching goals” (Gibson & Tulgan, 2002, p. 42).

      The forms of conflict that was displayed in the examples that was provided is intragroup and interpersonal conflict. Our text explains that conflict between people can arise in many individual differences such as values, attitudes, and perceptions (Nelson & Quick, 2016, p. 479). Imagine when you have a diverse group of employees in an organization and everybody values and attitudes are different? I believe that diversity is important in an organization. When interpersonal conflict was involved at my workplace, it seemed that the defense mechanism that was used is displacement. Table 13.2 shows that displacement is in relation to an aggressive mechanism where the individual redirects their emotions towards persons or ideas. I did witness this aggressive mechanism between the older employee and myself. Some ineffective conflict management techniques that I’ve seen on my job is fighting and conversion. Most of the time these conflicts tend to come out dysfunctional.

Respond 102

The issues that cause the most conflict in my work life are interdependence and status inconsistencies. Interdependence is difficult in my current position because the task that one person does is directly related to the task that someone else does. For example, I received title and there is someone else who mails titles. So, if I do not get titles received the day that they come in it puts more stress on her because she will be a day behind on sending them. This can get very aggravating especially when something beyond anyone’s control happens. Someone who I needed to finish a task before I could start something else was sick for a while and this put a damper on what I was doing because I would have to do their task first before starting my own. Status inconsistencies are a big issue to me as well. I feel like the purpose of a manager is to help the people below them with whatever tasks they need help with.  Some supervisors I have worked with will not help those beneath them and act like it is an issue to be asked any questions. It is also frustrating when they are taking person calls or out to lunch for longer than anyone else is allowed because it feels like they are not pulling their own weight. As a manager I feel that you should set the example for your employees, so it is frustrating to work with someone who does not do their best and lead by example.

2.

a. At a previous job the status inconsistencies was definitely the biggest conflict for me. The position was at a company that was almost for the state, but technically a nonprofit. The way that the company was run was more like a family business though. The president and the vice president of the company were husband and wife and another higher up was their daughter. Before working at this company, I had worked at another company with a friend of mine, Laura. When we moved to the new company she was promoted to supervisor within the first year. This was not an issue of being between her and I because she was much more qualified. The problem was that the company would advertise that they “promote within”, but when it came down to it they had hired her specifically for the position. At this point their values and ethics became questionable because all the other representatives who had been at the company for years and were looking for opportunity to advance were pushed to the side for this person who had just started. To make matters worse, they had not posted the position for others to apply for. After my close friend became a supervisor, I became more knowledgeable about the status inconsistencies. It turned out that the entire organization has no say in anything, no matter how bad of an idea that the vice president would have she would not listen to anyone else when it came to the final decision. When she would decide to listen to someone it would only be her daughter. It was more of a “queen to her peasants” feel to the entire organization and resulted in many people leaving.

b. The types of conflict were intergroup conflict. The group of customer service representatives became resentful towards the group of upper staff. It makes it harder to care about your position when you know that you will be passed up for a chance to be promoted and not given the opportunity to show your interest. “Groups in conflict tend to develop an “us against them” mentality whereby each sees the other team as the enemy, becomes more hostile, and decreases its communication with the other group (Nelson & Quick, p. 478).” This was definitely the case in this scenario. Many people stopped talking to the management team as much and would only communicate when necessary until they eventually quit.

c. The only interpersonal conflict that was evident for me was the daily decision to quit or not. I don’t believe that fits into any of the 3 subcategories. After the organization really started to show its true colors to everyone, there were many people dealing with the internal conflicting of keeping their job or being happy.  The defense mechanism that was eventually used was the fight or withdraw when I finally left the company.

d. The conflict management style that was used in this situation was avoiding. The manager and vice president of the company both chose to not answer anyone’s’ questions regarding their new appointment of supervisor. This type of conflict style can lead to people not collaborating with the management team at all in the future and will also bring down the trust that some employees had in the company (Duggan). This was an ineffective management technique in the situation. This was a dysfunctional conflict because it was not beneficial to the employees. The situation did not help anyone grow or learn to think in a new way, it only made people unhappy in their place of work. The goal of the organization was to keep the customer service representatives quiet and in their place while they made all the decisions and did not acknowledge anyone else’s opinions. “People who work in environments where conflict isn't managed effectively tend to exhibit both low job satisfaction and reduced productivity (Utleg, 2013).” This was very true in this organization, resulting in many people leaving the company.