Barriers To Managing Conflict

Imagine of a moment that every time you knock off late from work your spouse shouts at you without allowing you to give an explanation. You try to talk about it to give sense to the matter but there are no signs of change. Next time, obviously, you would be persuaded to think about divorce or calling for people to help resolving the conflict. You will see from this example that we all face conflict situations in various aspects of our lives. This could be in our personal life or at workplace. Consequently, we would be tempted to find ways to deal with these issues. Unfortunately, as Furlong (2005:2) said, the barriers to effectively managing conflict is we diagnose conflict unconsciously, react emotionally, make choices and apply tools that

According to Rahim (2001), conflict is an interactive process manifested in incompatibility disagreement, or dissonance within or between social entities (i.e., individual, group, organization, etc. For a conflict to happen generally you will need to have more than one party having different views or interests over something. Research has shown that conflict is inevitable hence a need to prevent or manage it. In an organization usually conflict arise due to various reasons, Moore (1996: 60-61) categorized the causes of conflict into five and suggested strategies in dealing with each conflict sphere. According to Moore, these categories are data / information, relationships, externals or moods, structural and values conflicts. To determine the real cause of conflict or a problem you will need to fist diagnose the problem then offering direction and ideas on resolving the conflict (Furlong, 2005). Furlong continues to say that for effective diagnosis and resolution one need to have a theoretical knowledge together with models and tools to help achieve accurate and useful

These are generally beliefs, values possessed by the parties contributing to the causing of a conflict. These may include life defining beliefs such as religion, ethics, morals or values placed in the business context regarding customers etc. (Furlong, 2005). A very classic example the writer encountered was between a physician and a Human Resource personnel at Partners In Health, a non- profit making organization where it believes to provide a preferential care for the poor. A physician looking at a burden of diseases at a certain facility, he develops job descriptions and propose restructure of certain positions in the clinical department and ask HR personnel to advertise and hire people to help reduce the burden of the diseases in the community. The HR practitioner argued that this was not budgeted, and all those new positions do not fit in the organizational structure. They are new positions who would affect the entire organization and he proposed for a senior members of staff meeting to determine how the imprecations would impact other positions in the organization. This did not go well with the other party and offered himself to resign if this does not happen. There was a clash of value which exacerbated the situation.
You would realize from this example that to deal with a value problem thing, HR Manager could employ the circle model strategy by binging the two parties together to share the information about their values.