How Management Teams can have a good fight - Essay Example

The authors clearly explain their view on the impact of conflicts in the organization. This paper criticizes the authors’ idea on the conflict resolution among the management and the eventual impact on the firm. According to the authors, conflicts may have both negative and positive ending. Considering that most managers regard themselves as rational decision makers, they may not effortlessly accept an opinion from any other person and they may, perhaps, deem as a personal attack from their fellows when the colleagues make some remarks.

It is difficult for most managers to make a distinction between personal differences and opinion peculiarity and maintaining the spirit of working as a team. The need to work as a team is sometimes assumed by managers as personal hostility and discord takes over the teamwork spirit. Fun, openness and productivity with no or less politicking and posturing represent the only way managers can come up with a healthy decision (Eisenhardt, Kahwajy & Bourgeois 78). Managers are required to manage their conflicts democratically with a clear distinction between substantive and personal issues.

In managing interpersonal conflicts, executive were prepared with information that is more detailed and multiple alternatives to enhance the quality of their debate. Availability of more data, which are objective-based, compels managers to focus on issues rather than personal matters or useless arguments rooted in ignorance. Inadequate information makes management rely mostly in guesses and baseless assumptions, which does not help the firm. Reliance on facts reduces involvement on personal issues, thus, reducing interpersonal conflicts.

In addition, administrators used humor and shared a common goal in debates while maintaining a balanced power structure. Furthermore, managers should be deeply involved in creating different options thus plummeting disagreement amongst decision-making participants which, in turn, promotes teamwork. Individual commitment in decision-making is achieved when joint effort is put in creating a number of alternatives. The authors further assert that the more the number of choices made by management, the greater the chances of coming up with more appropriate options.

By creating common goals in the teamwork, managers should outline their strategic options as collaborative rather than competitive while every individual must endeavor to achieve best possible solution for the group. Common goal does not imply uniform thinking but, rather, require everyone to have a clear vision towards a particular goal. Lack of common goal makes some members of the team think that they are in competition, thus, framing decisions as reactions to threat (Eisenhardt, Kahwajy & Bourgeois 80).

Using humor in decision making by the team releases tension among the management team and upholds collaborative spirit by making the business fun. The excitement while in decision making process reduces stress and brutal competition. Interpersonal conflicts are greatly reduced by using humor as a tool to avoid hostile and stressful environment. Humor acts as a defensive mechanism by decreasing the team temperatures and blunting the threatening edge of negative information. Humor that has very positive effect on mood may allow communication of difficult information in a more tactful manner and less threatening way.

Furthermore, humor may make people more