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Bringing any group of people together will naturally lead to conflicts in attitudes, goals, work styles and more. But when mishandled, these conflicts can spell disaster for an organization. Leaders who understand workplace conflict and its many potential causes can learn how to manage these situations more effectively and help their team reach more amicable resolutions faster.
Workplace conflict is a common part of working life and inevitable even in the most productive, healthy work atmospheres. Almost every workplace experiences some form of conflict regularly, with some having conflicts nearly constantly.
Though conflict in the workplace sounds destructive, it isn’t inherently bad. It all depends on how it’s handled. With the right leadership, conflicts can be a positive experience, allowing leaders and employees to better understand one another, deepen their relationships and improve their performance overall.
Leaders need to understand the common types of workplace conflict so they can better equip themselves to address these conflicts when they occur by applying the most appropriate management style and resolving issues before they become major problems.
Every employee has unique thoughts and viewpoints, which can be a massive advantage when it comes to innovating and strategic planning. However, these differences in temperament can cause team members to clash. Different communication styles and opinions, whether personal or professional, can lead to misunderstandings and foster tension.
One single task can be completed in a million ways. Task conflicts can arise if employees have opposing ideas on the best way to handle these tasks. This type of conflict can often have its roots in differences in how each team member understands company policies, procedures and instructions related to the job.
In project settings, each team member is responsible for different facets. Employees can become dissatisfied with their role and resentful toward others if they:
Every leader directs their team in different ways. When leadership approaches or communication styles are incompatible with employees, tensions can arise between leadership and team members.
A work style conflict occurs when team members have clashing preferences regarding how they complete work. Work styles include:
Work style conflicts are most likely to come up when your team has to collaborate on a project.
Your company’s policies and rules, as well as each team member’s personal convictions and beliefs, guide the decisions they make in the workplace. A value conflict occurs when there is a clash in personal or professional values between:
This type of conflict goes beyond simple rule-breaking. Value conflicts go to the core of morals and ethics.
Each department has a set amount of equipment, time, budget, personnel and other resources to complete daily tasks and projects. However, resource limits can create conflict among employees as they compete for their share. Team members may be unwilling to collaborate or support their co-workers, believing that helping them will risk their access to resources. Having to do more work with fewer resources can also cause employees to feel frustrated in their role. These feelings of frustration can bleed over to their interactions with other team members, resulting in conflict.
The structure of your organization can cause conflicts:
Team members can also feel suffocated if their leader micromanages their work. On the other hand, employees can feel lost and frustrated if leaders offer too few resources and guidance on work tasks.
Each team member has unique cultural backgrounds, life experiences and beliefs, and these perspectives can fuel more diverse thinking and well-rounded decision-making, resulting in a richer, more dynamic company culture. However, cultural and generational differences also mean your team members can have problems with one another regarding:
When employees believe that management treats the team unfairly through favoritism or discrimination, they can feel unmotivated or resentful, leading to conflicts. Discrimination against protected characteristics, a person’s religion, age, disabilities, national origin, race and sex, is illegal, according to equal employment opportunity laws in the United States. However, employees can also feel discriminated against if:
The key to resolving conflict in the workplace is to understand why it happens. Some of the root causes of work conflict include:
Leaders can manage and prevent most destructive workplace conflicts by:
Conflict in the workplace can be constructive or destructive, depending on how leaders choose to handle it. Leaders with an understanding of the various types of conflict they’re likely to see in their workplace are better equipped to guide outcomes toward more positive results.
The Situational Leadership® Essentials course from The Center for Leadership Studies (CLS) equips your organization’s leaders with skills to use the Situational Leadership® Model to strengthen communication and trust across the team. Our course empowers leaders to understand their team members’ priorities and expectations and develop a tailored leadership approach to meet their needs.
Contact us online today to learn more about the curriculum. Explore our other courses to build leaders in your organization.
