Organizaitonal Behaviour - Communication and Conflict

78-613-02 WINTER 2015

ASSIGNMENT

Instructor: Basak Yanar Heney

Jiangjie Xu (104199004)

Bamgbala Yewande

Cheng Li

Date: 25. March. 2015

Introduction

Communication and conflict go hand in hand. There is no communication without conflict and vice versa. Communication is an act of sending and receiving of information which usually involves two or more people. Conflict, on the other hand, in a form of disagreement or dispute that emerges due to communication or lack of it. This report talks about how an organisation is affected by lack of communication amongst employees who are trying to avoid conflict and confrontations, how leaders can handle the flow of information to, from and amongst their employees, how teams can encourage constructive conflict amongst the members of that team without destroying their ability to work together as a team, and how multicultural teams can overlook their cultural differences and work together as a team to achieve common goals.

Analysis of Four Articles

Some employees, in order to avoid conflicts, choose to keep quiet. Although related with some deeply rooted virtues, silence actually has consumed both individuals psychologically and organizations socially. But where silence begins to take effect? It often stems from people not admitting differences as they are afraid that they cannot be inclusive. In some cases you need to zip your mouth, such as some problems not related to working quality, or the non-perfect timing of expressing differences. Even, silent subordinates never know their bosses also suffers difficulties in imposing negative assessment on their working performance. The price of silent must be tremendous for individuals, and the sense of defending would increase the sense of insecurity, then will further aggravate the distrust. Also, silence will have a dual strike on the whole organization, because the people on both sides of conflicts will set useful, creative ideas aside. If the silence is going on, we will meet a “vicious spiral of silence”. To break such a spiral, we have to identify and utilize our power to present our ideas and thoughts. If one steps first, and then others would more likely to participate in the procedure of discovering differences together. Sometimes, employees need to behave in a way that goes against regulations. It is these actions that can indicate the parts the organization still needs to improve and also bring about more productive outcomes. However, the most essential way to deal with silence is to push employees to align with one another. In fact, you will feel as others do, and then you will get more unexpected resources, fresh ideas and ultimately, a brand new standard for the entire organization.

With regard to the relationship between the managers and employees, also called leadership, silence still exert a profound influence. How to cope with this dilemma? We have to deliver a new type of leadership, called “organizational conversation”, by comparison with that one-way, purely top-down, consisting of passive information receivers, relying on printed fragmented and ad hoc information of the old model of leadership, organizational conversation is more aligned with today’s smart leaders’ practice in four significant characteristics. Intimacy, which means communication can be upward and downward. In other words, a bottom-up, top-down and back-and-forth interaction should be developed for the dynamic and vigorous organization (Gary Johns, Feb 28, 2010). This requires leaders put high values on trust and authenticity, play a role as active listeners rather than speakers and gain more emphasis on leaders’ own performance. Inactivity, as the second part, in which the core content is face-to-face dialogue, means leaders should take advantage of Computer-Mediated Communication for promoting information exchange with employees, so as employees and their colleagues, like Telepresence, videoconference and video blogs  (Gary Johns, Feb 28, 2010). Inclusion, the third part, meaning that employees’ roles should be enlarged to such as brand ambassadors, thought leaders and storytellers, is to encourage employees participate in operating businesses and making up a company’s culture. Intentionality, as the fourth part, indicates the importance of setting an explicit agenda for informing information, which also motivates employees to create new strategies.

Is the inevitable trend of conversation means that conflicts are free from organizations? Not necessarily. Top managers tend to consider conflicts on issues are quite natural. Some unhealthy conflicts have been destroying the ability to work as a team, but some companies seem have a little interpersonal conflicts, and what they have done is that they are similarly using the six strategies to handle such obstacles. First of all, managers and employees should work and argue based on the facts. Without enough information being obtained, managers cannot learn about the internal operations and external problems, which will cause lower level of interpersonal conflicts. In addition, the management teams can pick up several merit points from several individual plans and integrate them into a more strong and persuasive plan. Of course, we should develop common goals for managers and employees that is a straightforward and effective way to reduce the threat of bitter quarrels and to generate team cohesion as a result of common interests. Humour, unexpectedly, also has play an important role in coping well with conflicts. Smart leaders who have great sense of humour can not only help the subordinates to release stress and to escape away from threatening environments, but also can stimulate a more cooperative and harmonious  atmosphere in the workplace. Fairness, is another essential part for employees to work more positively. To achieve this goal, management teams should balance the power structure, which is highly correlated with higher level of interpersonal conflicts. Sometimes, the team members would like to pursuit the consensus when confronting a problem in their work, but if it is hard to do so, the final decision should be made by the managers in higher level of the hierarchy.

Managing multicultural teams maybe one of the cases in managing conflicts. Multi-culture is always a reason of ineffective communication. But the actual difference may generates between high context culture and low context one. So it result in four main types of multicultural issues, including:1) exemplifying that westerners tend to be think and do things directly and explicitly while non-westerners put it in an indirect way; 2) some problems of non-native speakers’ accents and fluency will deeply hurt their self-esteem and confidence, and even cause misunderstandings; 3) some team members prefer work in flat organization structure while other ones would like to be treated in terms of their status and ranks; 4) how fast a decision can be conducted and how many related analyses are prepared in advance form cultural differences. Aiming at these problems, four effective strategies should be developed by Brett (Brett, 2006). The first strategy that there is no need to change the membership but they need to change their attitudes to adapt to the practice. And then, structural intervention as the second method means redesigning the organization to reduce interpersonal conflicts, or creating mix working groups to obtain information that cannot be easily discovered. Managerial interventions, as a common means of management, can be an effective way to set norms in the early phase of a newly-established firm. The only unusual strategy is convincing one or more team members to exit the organization, as they cannot adapt to the working cultures. After all, the whole team can work out any problems or conflicts better when getting together rather than thinking individually.

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