Getting to Conflict

On teams conflict is not necessary a bad thing. I know of a family down the street and it is the most productive way they have of getting things done. They are loud, but they get things sorted out. If all the team members agreed as to what needs to be done why appoint a team? Isn’t this right? You could save yourself time and money by figuring out whose idea everyone likes for what type of project the team is being called together. So conflict is good what are some of the types of conflict are you likely to see?

Thompson and Hrebec focus on two types of conflict. They say conflict is outcome or information based. Children often have outcome based conflict. This is where John cuts Sally a piece of pie and Sally expresses concern that maybe John wasn’t fair in the size of the slices. It never leaves us. Dividing work, recognition, and resources in a way that is sensible often takes negotiation. Another type of conflict that they talk about is informational conflict. Here each side has the same information but each side disagrees as to what it means. I witnessed a car accident awhile back and you can have ten people all see the same accident I saw and have ten different opinions of what happened. The only high probability argument is between the drivers; it will always be the other drivers fault. Similarly in business you can have two people look at an event or data, and have two very different definitions of what is being observed.

Here are some tricks to managing groups so effectually positive conflict occurs. One is the conflict must not be excessive. By excessive I mean either too present or very absent. The latter is called group think, or there is a person pulling all the strings. The former means people get so ticked at one another nothing can get done. The goal here is to get different perspectives without it turning into a feud.

So we know that conflict is best some where quite close to moderate. How is it kept near this range? It has to be based on perceptual differences where a specific function or issue is under consideration. Industrial Organizational psychologists called this task oriented conflict. The other type is personal. First is good, the second is bad. We want a unified body, but diverse perspectives. It sort of like this war that can goes on in my brain, “Do I want to do this or do that.” Despite the conflict one side of my brain does not try to annihilate the other side. My mind will either differ to my heart or one side will come up with an argument the other side buys.

One of the reasons one side of my brain does not do in the other side is the brain recognizes that the troublesome side is still necessary to the health of the whole brain. Individuals on a team must recognize this too. Members must feel that each other is essential. If this is not done then trust between members will quickly erode. And as you know without trust nothing gets done.

The short version is get people who respect one another on a team, but not so much they see “eye to eye.” Each member must bring expertise to the project that will enlighten the others. This can be formal knowledge (the stuff you get out of reading professional journals or attending a college) or tacit (first hand experience). This way things that the others may be overlooking can be brought to the front of the decision making process. The goal is as this occurs the end product will be better than any of the individuals could have achieved alone.