If workplace conflict is natural, what are the best strategies for its resolution?

The impact of workplace conflict is often intangible and therefore its high cost to businesses are rarely measured.The CPP Global Human Capital Report (2008) found that, on average, each employee spends 2.1 hours every week – approximately one day a month – dealing with conflict in some way (being involved in a disagreement, managing a conflict between co-workers, etc.). For the US alone, that translates to 385 million working days spent every year as a result of conflict in the workplace (equating to approximately $359 billion in paid hours in 2008).

While CPP did not include New Zealand in their study, research done by Harris and Crothers (2010) found levels of conflict in New Zealand were consistent with the CPP figures. This indicates that international literature is likely to be consistent with workplace conflict dynamics in New Zealand. 

Most organisations commonly experience conflict in the negative, as a constant distraction to the effective implementation of its strategy. They also tend to avoid and ignore conflict or at best poorly manage it when it does occur thus resulting in damaged relationships, lower productivity and morale, increased absenteeism and staff turnover and in extreme cases even sabotage, strikes and litigation. 

What are the main causes of workplace conflict?

• Personality clashes/warring egos

• Constant volatile and/or fast paced changes with limited resources to manage the changes, resulting in increased workload and stress
• Poor leadership from the top of the organisation and poor line management
• Lack of trust
• Poor communication skills
• Lack of understanding of different cultures & assumptions
• Lack of respect for different values, opinions, and beliefs
• Lack of sensitivity to race, gender, and age

And why do these conflicts seem to be increasing?

• Organisational Structure – With increased use of matrix structures, reporting lines have become unclear and there is increased competition for ever decreasing resources

• Globalisation – has demanded reengineering of businesses which allow them to be more nimble. Rapid growth of virtual teams and outsourcing, with people from different cultures working across multiple time zones have exacerbated the causes of workplace conflict discussed in the points above

So what are the most common ways we currently manage conflict?

According to the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Instrument, there are five key styles for managing conflict:

• Forcing — using your formal authority or power to satisfy your concerns without regard to the other party’s concerns
• Accommodating — allowing the other party to satisfy their concerns while neglecting your own
• Avoiding — not paying attention to the conflict and not taking any action to resolve it
• Compromising — attempting to resolve the conflict by identifying a solution that is partially satisfactory to both parties but completely satisfactory to neither
• Collaborating — co-operating with the other party to understand their concerns in an effort to find a mutually satisfying solution

Whilst collaboration seems the most positive choice, promising tremendous benefits, the reality is that despite spending billions of dollars on improving collaboration, few companies have been able to claim any tangible returns on their investment. Common initiatives to boost collaboration such as restructuring organisations, reengineering processes, creating cross-unit incentives and increasing team building training have had limited success.

So are we focusing on the wrong thing? The symptoms rather than the cause? What if the solutions lie in accepting conflict as a natural and inevitable occurrence in organisations and instead of trying to minimise, avoid, or eliminate them, organisations put strategies in place to deal with them so as to maximise the benefits that also naturally arise out of those very conflicts. 

Current research indicated that conflict actually has a positive side of promoting truly effective collaboration, improving performance through extracting value that lies latent in intra-organisation differences, fostering creativity and innovation and building deeper relationships...if managed properly. 

The CPP Global Human Capital Report (2008) found that “Training is the biggest driver for high-quality outcomes from conflict”. According to CPP 95% of the participants to their questionnaire who had received training agreed that the training they had received had helped them in some way. Furthermore, a staggering 58% of those participants that received training said they now looked for win-win outcomes from conflict. This indicates that training might be highly effective in changing staff attitudes about conflict. Unfortunately, it is rarely used by organisations and perhaps this point highlights the depth of confusion that exists about how to deal with workplace conflict. 

Jeff Weiss and Jonathan Hughes recommend the following strategies to manage conflict. They have split these between two areas, at the point of conflict and upon escalation up the management chain.

Strategies for Managing Disagreements at the Point of Conflict

Conflict management works best when the parties involved in a disagreement are trained to manage it themselves. The aim is to get people to resolve issues on their own through a process that improves—or at least does not damage—their relationships. The following strategies help produce decisions that are better informed and more likely to be implemented.

• Devise and implement a common method for resolving conflict. At the very least, a well-defined, well-designed conflict resolution method will reduce transaction costs, such as wasted time and the accumulation of ill will, that often come with the struggle to work through differences. At best, it will yield the innovative outcomes that are likely to emerge from discussions that draw on a multitude of objectives and perspectives. There is an array of conflict resolution methods a company can use. But to be effective, they should offer a clear, step-by-step process for parties to follow. They should also be made an integral part of all existing business activities.

Weiss and Hughes use the example of Intel, where new employees learn a common method and language for decision making and conflict resolution. The company puts them through training in which they learn to use a variety of tools for handling discord. Not only does the training show that top management sees disagreements as an inevitable aspect of doing business, it also provides a common framework that expedites conflict resolution. Little time is wasted in figuring out the best way to handle a disagreement or trading accusations about “not being a team player”; guided by this clearly defined process, people can devote their time and energy to exploring and constructively evaluating a variety of options for how to move forward. Intel’s systematic method for working through differences has helped sustain some of the company’s hallmark qualities: innovation, operational efficiency, and the ability to make and implement hard decisions in the face of complex strategic choices.

• Provide people with criteria for making trade-offs. Even when companies equip people with a common method for resolving conflict, employees often will still need to make zero-sum trade-offs between competing priorities. That task is made much easier and less contentious when top management can clearly articulate the criteria for making such choices. Obviously, it’s not easy to reduce a company’s strategy to clearly defined trade-offs, but it’s worth trying. For example, salespeople who know that five points of market share are more important than a ten point increase on a customer satisfaction scale are much better equipped to make strategic concessions when the needs and priorities of different parts of the business conflict. And even when the criteria do not lead to a straightforward answer, the guidelines can at least foster productive conversations by providing an objective focus. Establishing such criteria also sends a clear signal from management that it views conflict as an inevitable result of managing a complex business.
   
• Use the escalation of conflict as an opportunity for coaching. Even where a companywide conflict-management process is in place and where trade-off criteria are well understood—there is still a natural tendency for people to let their bosses sort out disputes. Senior managers contribute to this tendency by quickly resolving the problems presented to them. While this may be the fastest and easiest way to fix the problems, it encourages people to punt issues upstairs at the first sign of difficulty. Instead, managers should treat escalations as opportunities to help employees become better at resolving conflict.

Strategies for Managing Conflict upon Escalation

Certain complex disputes will inevitably need to be decided by superiors. Consequently, managers must ensure that, upon escalation, conflict is resolved constructively and efficiently—and in ways that model desired behaviours.

• Establish and enforce a requirement of joint escalation. The best way to avoid debilitating deadlock is for people to present a disagreement jointly to their boss or bosses. This will reduce or even eliminate the suspicion, surprises, and damaged personal relationships ordinarily associated with unilateral escalation. It will also guarantee that the ultimate decision maker has access to a wide array of perspectives on the conflict, its causes, and the various ways it might be resolved. Furthermore, companies that require people to share responsibility for the escalation of a conflict often see a decrease in the number of problems that are pushed up the management chain. Joint escalation helps create the kind of accountability that is lacking when people know they can provide their side of an issue to their own manager and blame others when things don’t work out.

• Ensure that managers resolve escalated conflicts directly with their counterparts. It’s not unusual to see managers react to escalations from their employees by simply passing conflicts up their own functional or divisional chains until they reach a senior executive involved with all the affected functions or divisions. Besides providing a poor example for others in the organization, this can be disastrous for a company that needs to move quickly. To avoid wasting time, a manager somewhere along the chain might try to resolve the problem swiftly and decisively by herself. But this, too, has its costs. In a complex organization, where many issues have significant implications for numerous parts of the business, unilateral responses to unilateral escalations are a recipe for inefficiency, bad decisions, and ill feelings.

The solution to these problems is a commitment by managers—a commitment codified in a formal policy—to deal with escalated conflict directly with their counterparts. Of course, doing this can feel cumbersome, especially when an issue is time-sensitive. But resolving the problem early on is ultimately more efficient than trying to sort it out later after a decision becomes known because it has negatively affected some part of the business.

• Make the process for escalated conflict resolution transparent. In most companies, once managers have resolved a conflict, they announce the decision and move on. The resolution process and rationale behind the decision are left inside a managerial black box. While it’s rarely helpful for managers to share all the gory details of their deliberations around contentious issues, failing to take the time to explain how a decision was reached and the factors that went into it squanders a major opportunity. A frank discussion of the trade-offs involved in decisions would provide guidance to people trying to resolve conflicts in the future and would help nip in the bud the kind of speculation—who won and who lost, which managers or units have the most power—that breeds mistrust, sparks turf battles, and otherwise impedes cross-organizational collaboration. In general, clear communication about the resolution of the conflict can increase people’s willingness and ability to implement decisions.

It is clear that the responsibility for managing conflicts lies with both the organisation and with individuals. This article has covered the different strategies for the organisation.  I will cover how individuals can get over their fear of and manage conflict more effectively in a future article.  

If your leaders are challenged and distracted by frequent workplace conflicts and you would rather they spend their time on effective implementation of strategy, we can help. Contact us today.

References:

(Tillett & French, 2006; Tillett, 1999; Stitt, 1998; Lulofs & Cahn, 2000; Brandon & Robertson, 2007; Ellis & Anderson, 2005; Eunson, 2007; Masters & Albright, 2002; Cahn & Abigail, 2007).

CPP Inc. (2008). Global Human Capital Report, July 2008. Workplace conflict and how businesses can harness it to thrive. Retrieved from http://img.en25.com/Web/CPP/Conflict_report.pdf

Andrew Harris February 2011. Deconstructing Workplace Conflict Resolution

Jeff Weiss is the author of the HBR Guide to Negotiating.

Jonathan Hughes is a partner at Vantage Partners, specializing in supply chain management, strategic alliances, and change management.