Introduction
Conflicts are inevitable, as people in collectives often have various values, interests, and attitudes that may contradict each other. All companies and teams should consider ways to solve conflicts of their members. The conflict’s source is tensions and discrepancies between views and values of people: they lead to misunderstanding and lack of trust and, then, to negative feelings toward each other. While they may ruin the organization, they show its problems, such as a lack of trust between employees, and the conflict resolving is addressing those issues.
Situation Overview and Conflict Factors
Conflicts are present among the multicultural leadership team members of the organization: they are deep and lasting for a long time. One of the conflict factors is the various cultural background of leadership team members: due to that, they have different values and life aims. They feel abused by some words: while for Caucasian team members, for example, some words may be normal, they are abusive for the Black or Hispanic team member. As the quarrel lasts for a long time, team members’ life views are different, and one should help them express those views explicitly to their fellows to reconcile with them.
Another factor is their different views on work: they have various thoughts about task priority and event types. This factor is not so heavy as the former, although it seemed that it was the main one at first. The primary conflict source is different values that lead to different life views (Hocker & Wilmot, 2014). In that way, while they all have the same interest in the organization’s success, they cannot negotiate how to reach it due to differences in their values and characters. All organization is affected by the conflict, as the leadership team is responsive to the events sponsored by it, and when they are in quarrel, the whole organization is paralyzed. In addition, as conflicts are public and everyone is aware of them, the organization’s employees and volunteers are demotivated, and their work efficiency is lost.
Conflict Resolution Styles
One may specify five types of conflict resolution styles, and each is useful in different situations. Those styles are dominating, accommodating, confronting, compromising, and avoiding: in general, confronting, compromising, and accommodating strategies are better than dominating or avoiding (Prieto-Remón et al., 2015). Avoiding is the result of a natural desire to get away from negative feelings while dominating follows from the desire to take everything under the control of one party and quickly solve the situation (Hocker & Wilmot, 2014). The accommodating style is the best to use in this case: it is long-term and is based on creating a long-lasting agreement between parties. In addition, goals and interests are better considered separately from life views and values: they are distinct conflict factors, and their influence is different (PON Staff, 2019). A suitable negotiation strategy should be used to create such an agreement and, thus, reduce the conflict potential.
Conflict Negotiation Strategies
Conflict negotiation is when parties try to find points where they can understand each other and stop the conflict. One may specify two negotiation strategies: distributive and integrative (Benetti et al., 2021). The former is based on the view that each party should yield something to obtain benefits for themselves: each party is considering only themselves and their interests. Unlike that, the latter claims that parties should find solutions that will benefit both of them. While the distributive strategy may be useful in some cases, the integrative one is more sustainable; thus, it is better to use it in this case.
To implement this strategy, each organization’s leader should write a list of cases when they feel offended by their fellows and then see similar lists of other leaders. Then, they will communicate about views of each other and express their feelings about their own views and how other members harm them by their behavior. This openness will lead them to trust each other more, which is especially important in cross-cultural negotiations (Benetti et al., 2021). Changing the behavior according to revealed triggers will create a long-lasting agreement to accommodate team members.
Outcomes: Positive and Negative Scenarios
The desired implementation of this plan is having several communication sessions between team members where each of them will be able to describe their feelings. During them, they should consider their interests in the project and their personal views separately (PON Staff, 2019). Those sessions aim to end their conflicts; thus, they should focus on their feelings and communicate. The positive outcome is the gradual lowering of the conflict tension, as leadership team members will change their behavior with fellows, being aware of their triggers. However, if they refuse to hear each other, for example, if the religious views of one of them are unacceptable to another, there is no way that they will solve the conflict. The only possible strategy is to stop communicating about those themes completely.
Conclusion
The reason for conflicts is differences between people in teams; they may be solved by negotiations. Each party express their feelings and, then, team members need to find ways of working together while considering the feelings of their fellows. Listening to each other is the most important during the negotiations. Without it, the outcome may be negative, as the conflict is strengthened when one party refuses to hear the other. When people express their feelings and do not prevent each other from doing this, they increase their mutual trust and, in that way, reduce the tension of the conflict. In that way, conflict solving is based on expressing feelings, searching for triggers, and correcting the behavior to not affect them.
References
Benetti, S., Ogliastri, E., & Caputo, A. (2021). Distributive/integrative negotiation strategies in cross-cultural contexts: a comparative study of the USA and Italy. Journal of Management & Organization, 27(4), 786–808.
Hocker, J. L., & Wilmot, W. W. (2014). Interpersonal conflict (9th ed.). McGraw-Hill Education.
PON Staff. (2019). Four conflict negotiation strategies for resolving value-based disputes. PON – Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
Prieto-Remón, T. C., Cobo-Benita, J. R., Ortiz-Marcos, I., & Uruburu, A. (2015). Conflict resolution to project performance. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 194, 155–164.