Essay on Organizational Conflict and Conflict Management: Diversity and Conflict

Any workplace environment is characteristic of positive and negative conflict. An effective manager needs to identify the positive conflict to maintain it and the negative conflict to ensure that it is addressed immediately. There are various causes of harmful conflict including competition, harassment, and personal conflict. There are instances where competition may be a source of frustration especially in instances where a higher performing employee, for example, a sales associate competes with a lower performing sales associate. The latter becomes frustrated in such instances leading to conflict. Harassment can be a source of harmful conflict because employees do not feel comfortable in their place of work. When individuals bring personal issues and feelings to the workplace, a harmful conflict will occur (Chaudhry, & Asif, 2015).

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There are instances where negative conflict can be avoided while other instances present situations that are beyond management control. Conflict because of harassment may be addressed through the development of strict measures that will govern employee and management behavior in the workplace. These measures will ensure that every individual in the organization gets fair and humane treatment thus avoiding instances of negative conflict. In the case of unhealthy competition, it is advisable that managers identify ways of encouraging healthy competition among their employees. It may be effective using rewards like bonuses for any individual whose productivity increases over a given period. It is, however, hard to manage conflict because of personal conflict because every individual experiences difficult personal issue that will affect how he/she functions at the workplace. To mitigate this factor management may offer emotion well-being services in the workplace for any individual with emotional issues to address.

Personality represents an individuals character traits and it is the factor behind how one acts. Therefore, if one is introverted, he/she would find it hard to deal with conflict head-on compared to extroverts who will readily address conflict. Extroverts often reactive to conflict and they will want to talk about it. Introverts, on the other hand, would rather stay quiet about the conflict and let it pass. Personality often indicates the strengths and weaknesses individuals have towards addressing conflict or the lack thereof.

I often experience conflict with my parents especially in interacting with other people. I am an introverted individual, which means that I prefer my own company than being with other people. There is the instance where my parents had mutual friends and they were forcing me to interact with their children because they felt that I kept too much to myself. It was an uncomfortable situation and I tried to voice out my issue to my parents. They were, however, reluctant and I had to endure the difficulty of engaging with the other individuals. I have however developed a small circle of close friends who I interact with more often.

References

Chaudhry, A. M., & Asif, R. (2015). E: a synthesis of literature. J Bus Manage Res, 9, 238-244.