Conflict In Teams Flashcards
Relationship Conflict
A-type conflict, emotional conflict, or affective conflict
Involves disagreements based on personal or social issues
Relationship conflict can interfere with the mental effort and performance of team members, and can be detrimental to job satisfaction
Task conflict
Aka c-type conflict, cognitive conflict
Involves disagreements about the work being done
Process Conflict
Disagreements that center on task strategy and delegation of duties and resources
Proportional conflict
Occurs when team members have different ideas about the amount and type of conflict that exists within their group
Perceptual conflict
The extent to which there is team agreement (or not) surrounding perceived conflict
Team Power
Team power refers to the control of resources that enables a team to influence others in the organization
The type of conflict behavior (constructive vs destructive) depends on:
- The level of team power
2. The likelihood that power determines success or failure for the team
Cross-functional teams
Teams that are composed of people from multiple disciplines, functions, and divisions who have different areas of expertise
The performance advantages of these teams are often not realized because the team experiences conflict
Can have representational gaps
Representational gaps
Inconsistent views in the way people define or approach a problem
The greater the representational gaps, the more teams disagree about a task
Direct influence
Indirect influence
When people entice team members to adopt their position
People in the majority privately agree with the minority
Benefits of minority representation in teams:
- cognitive activity in group increases
- increase in message scrutiny
- divergent thinking and consideration of multiple perspectives
- better decisions are made
- gain more original/creative ideas
Conflict in culturally diverse teams
- linguistic-related challenges increase likelihood of relationship conflict
- individualism vs collectivism
- benefits of training to express conflict appropriately and effectively
Work-family conflict
Stronger for people who are demographically dissimilar to their teams in terms of sex and and number of dependents
Team members tend to use one of the following methods to resolve disputes:
Rights-based approach - focuses on applying some standard of fairness, precedent, contract, or law
Power-based approach - use of force, intimidation, rank, or power
Interest-based approach - focuses on satisfying both parties core interests
Intervention strategies team leaders can use to improve the conflict resolution process:
- Team (re)design -do this first
- Task process coaching
- conflict process coaching -develop group norms regarding how to manage conflict
- changing the individual- do this last
Norms of Fairness
Different methods for allocating resources:
- equity method - Prescribes that benefits (and costs) should be proportional to team members contributions
- equality method - prescribes that all team members should suffer or benefit equally, regardless of input
- need method - Prescribes that benefits (and costs) should be proportional to members’ needs
Distributive justice
- the method of how to best allocate awards in an organization
- employees who regard their organization to be market focused tend to be interested in the distributive fairness of their organization
Procedural justice
- concern for how a person is treated by others, particularly authority figures
- employees who regard their organization to be bureaucratic tend to be interested in the procedural justice of their organization
The five styles of conflict are
Avoiding Accommodating Competing Collaboration Compromise
Avoiding
(Low assertiveness, low cooperation)
occurs when one party wants to remain neutral, stay away from conflict, or postpone the conflict to gather information or let things cool down
Accommodating
(Low assertiveness, high cooperation)
Occurs when one party gives in to the other and acts in a completely unselfish way
Competing
(High assertiveness, low cooperation)
Occurs when one party attempts to get his or her own goals met without concern for the other party’s results.
Win-lose form of conflict resolution
Collaboration
(High assertiveness, high cooperation)
Occurs when both parties work together to maximize outcomes. Win-win form of conflict resolution
Compromise
(Moderate assertiveness, moderate cooperation)
Occurs when conflict is resolved through give-and-take concessions
The five styles of conflict can be viewed as a combination of two separate factors
How assertive leaders want to be in pursuing their own goals
How cooperative they are with regard to the concerns of others.
Better teams can be purposely designed with high potential for performance success by
Building cohesion, examining how trust and respect are measured, and understanding the team role transition process
