Team Building - Essay Example

Conflict resolution process is essential to resolve conflicts that arise between individuals and/or groups. Conflicts can arise at many levels such as interpersonal levels, role level, between multiple parties, and at external levels (Fisher, 1977, Rev 1985 2000). At workplace, most common conflicts occur at interpersonal levels, which arise between individuals because of different needs, goals, and beliefs. The most common factor that is involved in interpersonal conflicts is the relationship between two individuals.

It is very difficult for a third person, like a manager, to analyze interpersonal relationship between two individuals because relationships are shaped by a variety of incidents in the past. Hence, it becomes extremely challenging to resolve interpersonal conflicts that arise because of relationship history (Collins & O’Rourke, 2008a). Nevertheless, such conflicts can severely affect their performance and behavior. Hence, it becomes important for managers to address conflicts at these levels in order to ensure smooth flow of work and maintain healthy environment in the team.

Very often, interpersonal conflicts are trigged by lack of communication or misinterpretation of communication. Interpersonal conflicts can be addressed by fostering effective communication among team members. For this, the team members must first be made to realize the significance of communication in workplace. This can be achieved by conducting this simple teambuilding exercise named ‘Do you know what I mean?’ (Kumar, n.d). This teambuilding exercise involves participation from the entire team.

Firstly, one volunteer from the team should be advised to draw different shapes/pictures of at least 10 different things that come to his/her mind on a chart. Next, the volunteer must instruct the team members verbally to draw these exact shapes without actually showing the chart. The team members may be allowed to ask questions. The result of this exercise will be that none of the group’s pictures will match the original picture exactly (in shape and/or size), and some may be completely different.

This exercise will make the team members realize the importance of communication in understanding the other person’s viewpoint in order to produce the desired outcome. Communication breakdown is considered as an important cause for interpersonal conflict. Therefore one has to possess or acquire effective communication skills to handle conflicts. Communication skills that are essential in conflict resolution include listening, asking appropriate questions, clarity of words and speech, and translating the conversation in the right manner that is acceptable to both the parties involved in the conflict.

In this teambuilding exercise, the team members need to ask open ended questions so that they get a better idea of the picture that needs to be drawn. Open-ended questions help in acquiring more information from the other person; and begin with words such as ‘how’ or ‘what.’ However, during conflicts, people tend to ask closed-ended questions that elicit only a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers (Collins & O’Rourke, 2008b). Open-ended questions provide more information and learning to the listeners.

Another important aspect of communication, especially important in conflict resolution, is to listen to the other person. In the present exercise,