Managing Conflict at Work

Understanding and Resolving Conflict for Productive Working Relationships

Clive Johnson, Jackie Keddy

• Publisher: Kogan Page
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780749459536
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione delle risorse umane
• Index: Business

Managing Conflict at Work provides practical guidance on how to prevent, contain and resolve conflict in the workplace. It demonstrates how effective conflict management can have a powerful impact on the way organisations channel their energies; encouraging positive mindsets and building stronger and happier workforces.
Putting the cost of rising conflict in context with recessionary times, it looks beyond individual cases to issues such as workforce motivation and corporate responsibility. The authors provide a wide range of practical techniques, tools and templates to support individuals who need to facilitate the resolution of employee disputes. Aimed not just at mediators and conflict practitioners, but at staff managers and anyone who needs to deal with people disputes; the book emphasises simple and practical ways for dealing with conflict situations - both when potential disputes are first emerging, and once a conflict has escalated into a formal complaint.
Also including international case studies, extensive appendix of templates, tools and forms, including stakeholder analysis, mediation in-take forms and reflective questioning prompts, Managing Conflict at Work provides practical support to ensure that your company prevents disputes and stays within the law.
The book is accompanied by an extensive range of ready-to-use templates and case studies and is supported by a dedicated website, providing information and downloads referred to in the book, as well as videos and podcasts.

1

The nature of conflict

THE TRUE COST OF NOT MANAGING CONFLICT

Conflict is everywhere. Even at a time when the number of global armed and political conflicts has actually fallen (Human Security Center, 2005; Ignacio, 2004), old enemies have agreed to share power in the interest of peace, and politicians in many countries are increasingly talking about the need for bipartisan cooperation to see us through ‘difficult times’, it’s virtually impossible to turn on the TV news or browse the pages of a broadsheet without stories of war and violence stealing the headlines. Many bitter disputes endure, the number of intra-state conflicts remains high (Uppsala University, 2004), and in the past 10 years, the world has woken up to fighting a new kind of enemy – the war against a ‘virtual state’ terrorist network.

Conflicts play out on any scale: between blocs of trading nations, local communities and neighbours separated by just a garden wall; they can be multinational, intra-societal or inter-personal, and concern ideological, cultural or economic differences, amongst others. But it’s not just on the global stage that conflict abounds. Bitter battles flourish in the boardroom, divorce courts, between businesses and their suppliers and over service commitments.

Whilst set in different contexts, the lessons and insights that can be learnt by studying conflicts of any kind are invaluable for understanding how to confront disputes in the workplace. We’ll therefore borrow from the wide base of know-ledge built up from the experience of resolving conflicts in general, not confining ourselves to lessons learnt about conflicts at work.

In the workplace, the time, energy and resources spent resolving conflicts is staggering. Recent research suggests that conflict resolution costs UK businesses nearly £40 billion each year (CEDR, 2006), not to mention the adverse publicity, unproductively channelled energy and additional pressures that ineffectively managed conflicts can produce, often leading to work-driven sickness for the aggrieved and ‘accused’ alike. Litigation alone costs US businesses hundreds of millions of dollars annually, easily reaching close to $100,000 a case when an employer is found liable and so required to pay a plaintiff’s legal fees and compensation, quite apart from the cost of continuing to comply with a court’s decision (Barnaba, 2009).

Were this not bad enough, legal costs are soaring, with the annual cost of civil litigation related to employment disputes now approaching $300 billion in the United States (AAA, 2006). A survey of corporate legal departments by international law firm Fulbright & Jaworski LLP revealed that larger US organizations typically witness 50 new cases crossing their desks annually, including a growing number of employment disputes (Indus Business Journal, 2009). Indeed, 54 per cent of the in-house lawyers surveyed claimed that employment disputes ranked amongst their top three listed concerns (Business Wire, 2006).

It’s then little surprise that a desire to reduce the volume of conflict-based cases reaching the courts, often without any attempt at earlier resolution, was an important motivation for the recommendations made in the 2007 Gibbons report on employment dispute resolution, commissioned by the UK government in 2006 (Gibbons, 2007). In the United States too, the American Arbitration Assoc-iation (AAA) states that the rising cost and resource commitment needed to bring employment conflicts to court has been a spur for increasing interest in Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR). Its extensive consultation with more than 250 legal counsels, representing organizations across different industry sectors and of varying sizes, confirmed a perception that ‘a stream of evidence has long suggested that there is real business value to the rapid, comparatively inexpensive, and easily-accessed alternative to the judicial system’ (AAA, 2006).

Meanwhile, in a survey of 1,200 UK organizations, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that respondents spent almost 450 days per year on average on activities relating to grievance, disciplinary hearings and employment tribunals. The survey found that the task of just preparing for tribunal hearings consumed an average 12.8 person-days of effort, considering the input required from line managers, HR and legal specialists (Haslam and Willmott, 2004).

Quite apart from the monetary costs involved, employee disputes consume management time, take staff away from productive tasks and may foster ill-feeling and resentment amongst more than those who bring their complaints to their organization’s notice, as illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Left unchecked, conflict involves people, ever-increasing time, and money

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT AND HOW IT’S ORGANIZED

This book is about conflict in the workplace – the type that creates divisions between people and workgroups, managers and their teams, and between managers and other managers. We’ll look at the dynamics of unhealthy disputes, how to resolve them and contain their fall-out, but also give attention to those conflicts that are actually positive, such as those that encourage constructive debate, a willingness to air ideas and healthy competition.

‘Managing conflict’ is broader than what most people understand as ‘mediation’, which we might paraphrase as: ‘an intervention between disagreeing parties involving a third party, aimed at bringing the dispute to a conclusion that both can accept’. It is a responsibility that needs to be shared by the whole management team of any organization as much as with those who might often be thought of as ‘the conflict specialists’:

• Front-line managers can play a vital role in recognizing the early stages of potentially unproductive conflict, step in and stop many disputes from developing further, as well as helping to minimize or prevent conflict from happening in the first place.
• HR managers are often the first point of contact for escalated disputes, though members of the HR team (as well as other managers with the right personal qualities, will and proper training) can play the role of mediator in formal disputes.
• Leaders have a key role to play in modelling desired behaviours, ensuring that conflict management strategy is given prominence and adequate resourcing, and in supporting a drive toward building a ‘happy company’.

The benefits of managing conflict effectively should be easy to identify for each of these, not to mention for those who find themselves embroiled in disputes. Crucially, time can be saved managing unproductive and unnecessary activities, energy can be better channelled into outputs that focus on business need rather than ‘people problems’, and incidences of stress-related sickness, discontented staff lapsing in motivation and commitment, and precious HR, management and organizational time and reputations being kept under wraps.

So, we’ll cover a lot of ground, considering the perspectives and needs of these different groups, and how these differing interests may be satisfied. To this end, the book is structured as follows:

• This chapter considers the relevance of conflict management in organizations, setting the scene for understanding where to start the task of reducing and better managing unhealthy disputes.
• Chapters 2 and 3 expand on how to diagnose conflict and outline a range of approaches for resolving disputes that have reached a different stage in their lifecycle.
• Chapter 4 offers a powerful model for conducting both informal and formal mediation.
• Chapters 5 and 6 consider the role that a front-line manager can play in stemming and preventing unproductive conflict, as well as in channelling constructive conflict.
• Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the tasks of formal mediation of escalated disputes, offering approaches for tackling the wide range of challenges and complexities that often get in the way of finding a ‘lasting peace’.
• Chapters 9, 10 and 11 consider how organizations can implement or build upon their existing approaches for minimizing and managing conflict, concluding with a powerful technique for assessing the impacts of such strategies.
• Appendix 1 provides an easy reference to what we have termed ‘micro-tools’ – question structures and techniques that might be used in many formal and informal conflict scenarios, whilst Appendix 2 offers a range of templates referred to in the text. Appendix 3 lists a wide range of online resources that aim to support the conflict manager.

The book is supported by its own website, giving access for downloading a wide range of the templates and tools that we refer to in the following chapters as PDF files, as well as including additional information and resources and regular updates. To access the site, please visit www.managingconflictatwork.com.

Before settling into the practicality of how to manage conflict, we should say a word or two about why conflicts often take on an unproductive character, and look at what typically happens when they’re allowed to take on a life of their own.

WHAT CAUSES CONFLICT?

What might appear to be a simple question – what causes conflict? – is far less easy to answer and may well be amongst the most difficult questions that need to be addressed during a conflict resolution process. However, some of the more common explanations can go some way to providing an answer. Three ‘big ideas’ will give a flavour of these:

Big Idea 1: Humankind is naturally predisposed to engage in conflict.

Big Idea 2: The ‘maturity-immaturity’ dilemma.

Big Idea 3: The ‘four worlds’ model of perception and behaviour.

Big Idea 1: Humankind is naturally predisposed to engage in conflict

Some biologists have argued that conflict is in our genes, though curiously this appears to be a relatively recent development in the human genome (McAuliffe, 2009). To survive, our Neolithic ancestors needed the protection of their tribe and a readiness and skill to fight. Capture by another tribe represented an everyday threat, whilst strength in the group made it easier to protect territory and the resources it provided for survival.

In our predatory relationship with other animals too, early man’s trump cards were his cunning and intellect. A need to survive encouraged the development of highly accomplished abilities to ensnare and kill prey, driven by a belief that it is necessary to fight or die. However, within their own groups, whenever hunter-gatherers faced a conflict, the fight tended to be short-lived, with one party quickly backing down. The energy expended on local quarrels was just not worth the effort. Today, this principle is well illustrated by the approach for resolving conflict taken by a small ethnic group from the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, the Dou Donggo (Monaghan and Just, 2000).

Rapid dispute resolution – the way of the Dou Donggo

One night in the village of Doro Ntika, a relative of a young woman named ina Mone burst into the home of a friend, claiming that his sister-in-law had been assaulted. Rushing to her house to offer help, it seemed clear to the friend that ina Mone was in distress, her shirt torn and her face daubed with a medicinal paint where she said she had been beaten.

An elder of the village was called, and a court was con...