Influence and change in organizations - Essay Example

Since the “creativity, innovation, individuality, and independence” of the workforce decreases out of poor teamwork (Robertson, Callinan and Bartram, 2002, p. 29), the overall work performance of a team tends to suffer. Also known as interpersonal interaction conflict, another factor that can trigger a significant decline in work performance is the presence of relationship conflict. Based on the research study that was conducted by Martinez-Moreno et al. (2009), the presence of relationship conflict when combined with process conflict could severely damage the team performance.

Similar to the research findings of Martinez-Moreno et al. (2009), explained that the presence of positive and negative mood has a significant impact over the level of relationship conflict. According to De Dreu and Weingart (2003), relationship conflict occurs when the team members encounter interpersonal disagreements with one another. When left unresolved, the presence of task-related and relationship conflicts could adversely affect the team members’ desire and satisfaction to work with the group (Bono et al., 2002). In most cases, having a large group of unsatisfied team members is enough to motivate themselves to withdraw themselves from working with the team.

Given that the number of unsatisfied team members is high, the chance wherein the group performance would decrease increases. In the past, several studies revealed that the presence of interpersonal disagreements could negatively affect the mood, feelings, and work attitude of the involved team members (De Dreu and Weingart 2003; Bono et al., 2002). With this in mind, it is clear that the presence of relationship conflict can be considered as a hindrance towards the ability of the team to improve the quality of their group performances.

Since the presence of relationship conflict can create an unhealthy work environment, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) should challenge himself to keep on searching for new ways on how to effectively solve issues not only related to relationship conflict but also that of a task-related conflict. To improve team performance, the CEO should be aware of the importance of having a good leadership approach. Basically, a good leadership skill is necessary to increase the ability of the CEO to motivate the team members to become not only a self-directed employee but also an active team member who can be easily directed to work towards a single organizational goal (Bambacas and Patrickson, 2008; Mayfield and Mayfield, 2006; Barbuto, 2005).

In this case, the use of transformational leadership style is effective in terms of encouraging the rest of the team members to work well without much need of supervision (Winston and Patterson, 2006; Barbuto, 2005). To accomplish a collective goal, each of the team members is expected to work interdependently as they convert their inputs into a group performance (Marks, Mathieu and Zaccaro, 2001). However, the presence of conflicts makes the team unable to accomplish a collective goal. By nature, task-related or informational conflict and relationship conflict differs from one another.

For this reason, Curseu (2011) strongly suggest that the CEO should carefully select the best leadership style that could effectively solve the type of disagreement. For instance, when solving problems related to relati