Inter-Personal Conflicts in an Organization - Essay Example

Inter-personal conflicts in an organization: Introduction: Unity among the employees of an organization is fundamental to the maintenance of peace in the culture of an organization. In an organization, different people with varying attitudes and individualistic goals work together for one particular goal i.e. success of the organization. Employees come from different backgrounds and hold the same dissimilarity in their views and opinions about the course of action that needs to be adopted to attain the pre-defined organizational objectives. This variety of opinions often leads to the development of grudge among the employees, particularly if the management of the organization is weak and incapable of identifying the loop holes in the hierarchical employee structure within the organization. This leads to delays in the accomplishment of goals, and makes the owners susceptible to incurring huge financial losses and ultimately, the profits are minimized. In this paper, I have shared my experiences of conflicts with some of my colleagues, and also have devised ways which the management could have adopted to help suppress the arousal of such events of inter-personal conflicts and promote unity and harmony among the employees. The incident of conflict that I have discussed in this paper relates to my very early days in the organization that I am currently employed in. The conflict: I had been in the company for over a month now. At the time I was hired as the Assistant Project Manager (APM), my director escorted me to my room without having me introduced to my colleagues that had already been working there for long. Before that, I had a small meeting with the director, and he narrated to me my job responsibilities, though he had not been quite careful in defining my domain limits. From his speech, I can tell that he was not very sure how to fit me into the structure of the organization, and thus, decided to appoint me as APM for the time being. I think he desperately needed someone to come, perceive the errors in the work structure of the organization and help him in the rational decision making to set the things right. Since I was left in the company on my own to explore and conceive the culture myself without any formal help from my director, it took me about 1 month to achieve that. After studying the organization carefully, I came to the conclusion that it was fundamentally a functional organization, in which individual departments had developed grudge against one another. It could be referred to as a weak project matrix organization where main power rested with the functional departments and the role of project manager was very weak. Authorities of the project manager were limited because the director had blood relatives in such other departments as finance and administration. I believe that in order for an organization to achieve its intended objectives without unnecessary fuss, project manager needs to be authorized enough to have control over all other functional departments. But the director would not believe the project manager whenever he made a complaint against somebody simply because his sympathies were with his relatives that he had appointed as managers of different departments. Being the APM, I assumed the responsibility to supervise and monitor various projects simultaneously. Often, I would need to go over a distant site and needed necessary funds and administrative facilities. But the colleagues from these departments were reluctant to assist me with that. What to talk of that, they had still not accepted me as the APM as yet. One particular day, as I needed the transport to go to a distant site, I said to the administrator, “Mr. X, I need a bigger car because I will have to carry 6 tradesmen with me. Please tell me the No.” He retorted, “No, you will have to go on the motorbike, tradesmen are not our problem. You only need a bigger car because you think you deserve one. You are trying to dominate us.” I was taken aback by his response. They would say anything because they knew they were not in trouble anyway. Administrative staff was extremely difficult to talk to and they produced hurdles in the approval of my bills. Same was the case with finance members. They would often talk to me harshly and hold me responsible for the resulting delays. The basic source of conflict was that they were related to the director, so kept an edge over me in that respect. Their attitude was heavily impacting the projects. Also, I was not able to do things efficiently because of their non-cooperative attitude, particularly when I had to visit far away sites. There were communicative problems and there was no understanding between me and my colleagues because I was new. Resolution: What particularly made things worse because there were non-technical people filled in technical positions and they did not know how to do the job. In order to avoid such circumstances, it is the responsibility of the director to make sure that the staff is hired on the basis of its competency, and not because someone is related to the owner. Being the supreme authority holder, it rests with the manager to realize how detrimental the effects of prioritizing relatives over other employees are. Therefore, the director should have first of all, maintained certain technical criteria of selection and should have fired the employees that did not make up for it. Secondly, the director should have designed task forces for particular projects. This could have been extremely beneficial for me particularly when I had to go to distant sites. Task forces should have been composed of members representing their respective departments chosen in the group to address specific projects. This way, instead of homogeneously staffed departments, individual task forces would be heterogeneous clusters. Each task force should be a wholesome package that should suffice the assigned project. When I had to go on a particular project, I should have been assisted by the assigned members from the administrative and finance departments. Performance of employees in each task force should be evaluated on the basis of the successful completion of the allotted project. Such approach tends to create unity, affection, affiliation and harmony among members representative of different departments as they happen to spend time together and ultimately a win-win situation is developed. Evaluation of virtual approach: Had I a choice to avoid face-to-face contact with those people, it would have helped me a lot. One reason why the administrative and finance members were harsh towards me was because I seemed quite young for my designation. They expected the APM to be over 40 years at least, and I was only 24 years old at that time. Having seen me, they considered me immature and unworthy of the post. Therefore, they particularly misbehaved with me. Things would have been different, had they not seen me and only listened to me on phone. In such circumstances, the employees would not have messed with me, yet they still would have an edge over me because they were related to the director. Hence, a director needs to understand the detrimental effect of valuing relations over business both in a virtual environment and otherwise. Besides, a virtual environment is preferable over its physical counterpart because it tends to “reduce the number of systems that are needed, reduce the power consumption of their data center, and may, if the proper management tools are also deployed, reduce their administrative and operational costs.” (Kusnetzky, 2007). References: Kusnetzky, D. (2007). Why choose a virtual environment? Retrieved from http://www.zdnet.com/blog/virtualization/why-choose-a-virtual-environment/131. Read More