Why Organisational Conflicts Assume Great Importance - Essay Example

Organizational conflict arises as a result of differing personal viewpoints. Disagreements occur frequently between workers within an organization, and as they do not affect organizational effectiveness, they are looked upon as healthy outlets of workers’ personal beliefs and opinions. Disagreements usually end up amicably, without needing intervention by third parties. The intelligent manager should monitor the progress of a disagreement carefully to ensure that it does not worsen to have direct effects on the workers’ behavior and their capacity and zeal to work properly (Cram et al.).

A shrewd manager should try and eliminate, or when not possible, address and resolve organizational conflicts quickly. If this is not done, the organization stands to face many bad consequences. The first bad consequence is higher employee turnover. One of the disputing workers could resign, which will need the organization to pay termination costs, and also incur expenses to find and train a new replacement worker. The second bad consequence is that the organization’s working environment becomes tense and heavy with stress. Since the conflict matter is not discussed (let alone solved), an atmosphere heavy with lack of trust, anxiety, and apprehension is created.

Such an unpleasant atmosphere acts adversely on workers, causing them to develop passive-aggressive behavior patterns. In addition, the manager who cannot solve conflicts swiftly and effectively fails to inspire trust and confidence in workers. Such a set of circumstances badly hits the reputation of the organization, causing it to face business losses, and making it very hard to recruit new employees and prevent existing employees from leaving. The third and most serious consequence is a distinct loss in business productivity. Feelings of wariness, fear of hostility and mental strain serve to decrease worker motivation and badly affect their concentration ability. As a result, they are not able to do their work to the best of their ability, and business productivity therefore suffers (Cram et al.).

Some business experts claim that unresolved organizational conflicts form the biggest avoidable cost in business (Cram et al.). It is a tragedy that this problem has still not been sufficiently understood by businesses around the world. Managers must do their best to reduce the cost of such conflicts. This can be done in two ways.

The first is to increase their awareness of the problem by understanding and analyzing the reasons why organizational problems occur. The four main reasons are: Managers do not know how to seek important information from front-line employees while taking decisions; Managers do not know how to motivate employees to put in best productivity efforts; Managers do not properly explain the reasons behind any change in the organization to the employees; and organizational problems are considered from the perspective of the employee or department, instead of from that of the organization as a whole (Mindframesconsulting.com).

The second step involves managers taking specialized training courses in conflict resolution. Such courses will help them identify symptoms of organizational conflicts and learn ways to resolve the conflicts. Possibly the best method is to acknowledge the conflict openly and then call a staff meeting to discuss it at length and find a solution that will suit all the disputants simultaneously (Mindframeconsulting.com).



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