Interpersonal Skills and Conflict Resolution - Essay Example

Interpersonal Skills and Conflict Resolution Introduction In any social, academic or professional situation, it is virtually inevitable that conflict, in some fashion, is going to develop. Professionally, conflict can be a product of stress and pressure or differing beliefs stemming from managers with poor interpersonal skills. Conflict, it would seem, is a part of everyday life and only those with fully functioning personalities, including psychological maturity and flexibility regarding change, can successfully manage conflict. This paper describes experiences with conflict in the professional environment, using theories of interpersonal skills development, to describe management and employee conflict. Conflict in Professional Life In the professional environment, managers and employees often interact at the interpersonal level and the outcome of these meetings can either be positive or negative based on how the discussion is managed from both parties. When working with special projects or within multi-cultural work teams, disagreements can occur when different social values and beliefs make it difficult to reach a group consensus. In virtually any business environment, there are going to be situations where people of differing backgrounds, maturity levels, and those with different psychological needs are forced to work together and produce an effective project outcome. In order to be a positive group contributor, all members of the team must be fully functioning, with maximum maturity at the psychological level and be open to new experiences with a flexible mindset. This often does not happen in project teams, due to differing levels of emotional intelligence within each project team member, creating problems with achieving the project task. In one particular situation, a project team was set-up which required the talents and knowledge of many different people within the organization. Many of the chosen group members were from different cultural backgrounds, had unique experiences in business, and also had differing levels of authority within the organization. The goal of the project was to come up with an innovative solution to integrate a new human resources model which focused more strongly on providing better in-house benefits for those employees and managers who exceeded business expectations relating to performance. The project team was instructed to review existing human resources policies, analyze all job roles within the organization, and come up with unique solutions to a growing problem with turnover. Many employees were leaving the company in favor of better opportunities which was costing the company high financial resources for training and developing new employees on a regular basis. The business found that its competitive edge was being lost in relation to human capital. From the start, cultural beliefs among the team members were radically different and caused considerable disagreement regarding how to proceed with policy changes. Some members, especially those from more collectivist cultures, which value group consensus over individual accomplishment (Mathis and Jackson, 2005), felt that team-based rewards were the best solution to the business’ problems. Other members, those with individualist viewpoints, believed that individual reward structures would be better suited for competitive advantage and the reduction of turnover. This inability to agree on solutions created interpersonal conflict from all business stakeholders, making it difficult to come up with new policy changes. This particular project team was chosen as the conflict of discussion because of the short- and long-term impact it left on group relationships and also the relationships between managers and the business’ employees. Many members of the team had egotistical self-concept due to their high level of education or experience while some others had less self-esteem and could not present their ideas with confidence and their body language gave off mixed signals to the project team. What was essentially created in this team was a great deal of social animosity, poor communications, and constant verbal disagreements. In a short period of time, even managers and employees who were not a part of the human resources project team began to express their own dissatisfaction with how the team was progressing to handle the turnover issue and felt that they were not being taken into consideration when deciding on the new policies and processes related to rewards. Essentially, the project team had been designed to create a more positive organizational culture which was efficient and competitive, however the impact of being unable to reach agreement, due to different values and beliefs, only made the human resources problem worse at multiple levels. Carl Rogers suggested that a fully functioning person should have high levels of emotional maturity and be aware of these emotions in others in order to communicate effectively. The fully functioning person should be open to new experiences and change with a congruence in awareness, communications, and experience to reach their ideal selves (Rogers, 2009). Many people within the human resources project group were not fully functioning nor did some of the team members even seem to care about the emotional state of others within the group. This was obvious by the heated exchanges between team members and their inflexibility toward accepting new ideas and policies offered by their colleagues. Managers in the group, who were expected to take the lead in most discussions, often said one thing but their body language completely said another. “When project managers talk with stakeholders, they must be aware of their body language and posture. This aspect of communication can help or hinder the message” (Phillips, 2007, p.29). At the cultural level, some of the managers were strongly against individual rewards due to their own collectivist beliefs, however in order to be politically correct, would half-heartedly give their verbal approval of a new policy idea offered by the team. However, through gesturing and body language, the managers often made it clear that they were angry and bitter over the situation. “The specific manner in which the hands are used during social interaction varies cross-culturally, as do the rules governing appropriate use” (Pitts-Taylor, 2008, p.71). In many situations, this duplicity coming from managers within the team gave other team members reason to be angry and frustrated because it was clear, through body language and hand gesturing, that no consensus was ever going to be reached about which reward system was best for the organization. Some members of the team, especially those from different cultures and backgrounds, felt that this psychological immaturity coming from managers was very unacceptable and this created much less trust between team members. “Most individuals only focus on the verbal part of an encounter, yet during an average 30-minute meeting, approximately 800 different nonverbal messages are exchanged” (Hargrave, 2008, p.18). In the project team, body language was one of the key conflict generators because it was so obvious, through non-verbal communication, that many managers were both disgusted and bitter about decision-making which was occurring in the team environment. Instead of giving their true opinion and letting the group discuss the issue in a mature and empathetic manner, body language was used rather immaturely in order to create interpersonal conflict and disagreement at the social level. This duality created a great deal of mistrust within the group, where deceit was expected to occur each and every time the group got together to discuss the rewards system. Many people suspect that people who lie will avert their eyes rather than making solid eye contact with others (Lawson, 2006). Simply because the process of coming up with a valid rewards system had become so difficult, people on the team would not make eye contact with one another due to mistrust, anger, and even individual ego. This aspect of body language, averting eyes, only added more fuel to the mistrust within the group and it eventually got the point where most team members felt they were being deceived by all of their peers. “Persons differ in their sensitivity to comments or actions of others, as well as their ability to deal with the stress created in conflict situations” (Billikopf, 2009, p.1). Because some members of the group came from collectivist cultures, where group work is considered most important to business success, averting of the eyes in some cultures is considered to be offensive and rude. Therefore, when managers would not look at their colleagues during presentations or discussions, those from collectivist groups felt that they were being patronized as well as deceived. Averting the eyes as a means to avoid interpersonal discussion was done only out of frustration and anger, which had become two very common emotions in each team session. However, those with less developed self-concept considered this to be a blow to their own self-esteem when they felt they were being rejected as valuable contributors to the team effort. “While it is important that we are sensitive to how we affect others, there is not much virtue in taking offense easily ourselves” (Billikopf, 2009, p.1). The poor use of body language coming from managers showed how little they were concerned with the needs of others within the group and the impact it would leave on them at the interpersonal level. Many of those who were offended or hurt emotionally by averting of the eyes rather than solid eye contact being made were not fully functioning people with a strong balance between their emotional state and how they respond to social situations. These team members allowed the conflict to strongly affect how they viewed themselves and their role in the organization, making them self-conscious and unwilling to provide solutions in public group discussions. This only led to more conflict and less efficiency in meeting the group’s target human resources goals. “Focusing less on yourself and more on others will yield big payoffs in expanded social opportunities” (Casriel, 2007, p.70). However, managers who disagreed with individual rewards for performance did not bother concerning themselves with the emotional stability of non-fully-functioning group members and these managers simply allowed their personal beliefs and egos to ruin relationships and also prevent success in meeting the group’s goal of developing workable human resources policies. Managers, in a successful organization, are supposed to sense what others need, acknowledge their strengths and accomplishments, offer meaningful feedback, and mentor to help develop their weaknesses (eiconsortium.org, 1998). This would describe an emotionally intelligent person who is fully functional and aware of the psychological needs of others. One of the most important human needs, which is shared by virtually all people in society, is the need for social belonging. Abraham Maslow, a 20th Century psychologist, developed a Hierarchy of Needs in which people require social belonging before they can develop self-esteem or achieve their greatest accomplishments (Weiten and Lloyd, 2005). This is a foundational aspect of managerial training where creating a unified organizational culture should be a key goal for the successful manager. This would suggest a manager with considerable congruence at the psychological level who can recognize needs in others and work to provide a more team-focused environment. In this project team, the self-motivated actions of managers and their strong opposition against individual human resources rewards made many with low self-concept feel as though they were being excluded from discussion. However, these team members with lower self-esteem would not discuss their true emotions during the team discussions, instead they would later discuss these complicated emotions with their other colleagues, which created a very negative organizational culture. When group members felt compelled to discuss their true emotions outside of the meeting environment, they gave their colleagues one-sided information which was often not based on fact but on their strong emotions. “People tend to distort their perceptions and judgments on the basis of their desires for emotional comfort” (Barber, Gordon and Franklin, 2009, p.435). What this means is that people create their own beliefs about a situation based on a phenomenon known as source attributions. Angry colleagues would discuss the team situations from an individual viewpoint, allowing the receiver to make source attributions incorrectly, therefore they would adopt the same beliefs of the frustrated team member only because they could relate with the emotions. These discussions were rarely based on facts of the meeting, but only on the negative emotions being felt. This also showed that many people on the business staff were not very sophisticated in terms of developed congruence which led to other peers, who were not in the HR group, to develop a similar mistrust for managers which was not even based on facts. This conflict eventually began to spread throughout the entire organization. What resulted were employees who began to rally against management’s position on group versus individual reward systems, while managers became less responsive to employee needs based on their own emotions about the issue. This created a large divide between leadership and the regular employee population. However, leaders within the organization are supposed to “make judgments and decisions that are in the best interest both of their own growth and that of other people” (Paris, 2002, p.1). This was not occurring at the managerial level, which again reinforced that many managers were no emotionally equipped to handle leadership roles and lacked the congruence necessary to be effective managers. Many of the managers were more focused on their own self-concept, which was distorted by ego and also by how they perceived their reputation was being damaged in the employee population. When these non-fully-functioning managers began to realize that they were being discussed, negatively, in private meetings with employee peers, it only created more resistance to achieving a workable HR rewards policy and made them desire to give less coaching and mentoring to employees. Rather than being a self-actualized manager, with the interpersonal skills needed to resolve this petty and biased conflict, managers used immature psychological tactics, such as hand gesturing or averting of the eyes, to make themselves appear in control. This only managed to anger the employee population, and the team members, when cultural and individual beliefs collided in a way that produced no meaningful team or organizational results. As the project team’s timeline for completion of creating a new human resources reward system began to over-run its agenda, it became obvious that there was not going to be any meaningful consensus reached. Members of the project team who felt that team-based rewards were going to cause more long-term problems in the company simply would not abandon their beliefs on this subject and come up with a cooperative solution. This battle of wits prevented the team from coming up with appropriate solutions to the problem of how to reduce turnover and improve employee relations without negatively impacting the business. None of the managers who allowed their emotions to dictate their decision-making expressed high levels of emotional maturity which allowed them to get involved in these bitter disputes in a way that provided no emotional value for others in the group. Instead, they began to make irrational demands and offered solutions which were not practical to the business simply to justify their unique positions on the issue. This only created further conflict in the team and reduced the level of respect which many team members once held for others. A person in touch with their true selves, and are mature enough to express these actual emotions and beliefs, “want to have good relationships with others and care about their welfare” (Paris, 2002, p.1). What began to happen was that managers used their authority and position in the business to attempt to persuade other managers, even at the senior-level, that it was the employees and not the management team which was causing the project to be so very unsuccessful. Also conducted in private sessions between management peers, the managers with distorted self-concept were able to successfully make their leadership peers believe that there was an inherent problem with employees at the performance and psychological level. Toward the end of the group’s timeline, senior leadership began to adopt similar source attributions about the situation and eventually came into the meeting environment to observe what was occurring. When this happened, employees were frustrated that they had been presented in such a negative light that it became necessary for senior-level administration to intervene to bring order to a very chaotic environment. Managers, who were supposed to be congruent, well-developed interpersonal masters, used their own ambitions regarding personal reputation to deceive other managers to believe that employees were causing disruption. During the times when senior managers were observing the meeting environment, managers were on their best behavior and avoided the use of heavy gesturing and negative verbal arguments. Instead, the managers were on their best behavior and made it appear as though they had, from the beginning, been trying to help others in the group at the psychological level by appealing to their emotions and need for positive self-esteem. These managerial actions clearly showed group members that managers could not be trusted and could, when it fit their own needs, be better mentors, coaches and positive leaders in group environments. They had become so well-versed in deception in order to protect their reputations in the business that they managed to fool senior managers, who ultimately asked for the group to be reorganized with new key players in order to make it more efficient. Managers allowed their own needs for belonging with senior leaders and their hopes for job security to become more important than securing an end to conflict, improving organizational morale, and finding a solution which fit the business’ long-term needs. These managers’ true selves were identities which, when motivated by damaged reputations and career ambitions, would be willing to damage the reputation of their own employees in order to paint themselves in the best possible light in the eyes of senior administration. These actions were so obvious to the employee group that resistance to many different organizational policies, not just those governing the project team, began to become a common problem in the business which never really seemed to reach any sort of resolution. Senior managers genuinely believed, based on the source attribution phenomenon, that employees were 100 percent of the problem and that organization-wide training in group and peer relationships was recommended, which only angered the employees further and caused them to look for new job opportunities. In order to win approval from others, which is a fundamental need for most people, individuals sometimes resort to behaviors which are unhealthy for themselves and for others. This is closely related to Maslow’s belief that all people, at the inherent level, have a need for belonging and will pursue this as a method of building positive self-esteem. The managers in the human resources project team were no different and began resorting to unhealthy actions to get the approval they desired from their senior-level bosses. These managers knew that senior managers were heavily involved in client relationships and were often concerned with strategy and finance, therefore they did not have working knowledge of the interpersonal dimensions of the organization and how employees performed to meet goals. They relied on the advices of junior managers and often reacted to their suggestions without analyzing the situation with their own research tools. What managers did was exploit employees and paint many of them as being unmotivated, resistant to change practices and policies, and without the self-development necessary to work dependently with others in the organization. Because of this, employees were often targeted for disciplinary action even though they were not the genuine cause of the problem and they were put through costly training and development courses which were not needed. Again, managers were even willing to waste organizational resources and finances to mask their true selves, as leaders incapable of providing meaningful interpersonal environments, simply to receive the sense of belonging and admiration they wanted from senior-level colleagues. After a short period of time, company research indicated that turnover problems had increased by quite a large margin, however due to source attribution and rigid self-concept, it was always attributed to employee failures and not a breakdown of junior manager competence and emotional intelligence failures. Conclusion Being empathic toward others and using a combination of body language and verbal expression to tell a person’s true feelings is a key aspect of being fully functional and the ideal self. In the human resources project team, there were very few, if any, members of the team who put the needs of others ahead of their own values and beliefs. Collectivist versus individualistic group members could never see eye-to-eye on how best to create new rewards systems and neither could seem to abandon these beliefs for a moment to see the point of view of others. This reflects a person who requires development in relation to interpersonal skills and a lack of congruence related to the self and others in the environment. In many ways, it was almost comical how managers used body language to express their dissatisfaction while verbally telling others that they were on-board with an idea. The employees with poor self-concept and lower self-esteem viewed this as a threat to their own sense of belonging within the organization and, rather than dealing with it in a more mature and effective manner, simply resorted to similar tactics in order to outperform the managers at the psychological level. In this group environment, conflict resolution could have occurred if employees and managers had not been so heavily resistant to new ideas and were more concerned with awareness of others rather than their own personal motivations regarding self-concept and reputation within the business. After senior-level administration had been convinced, successfully, that the problem was due to employee immaturity and resistance to change, the organizational culture never recovered. This strongly reinforces the importance of congruence and reaching the ideal self in any type of leadership position. References Barber, S., Gordon, R. and Franklin, N. (2009). “Self-relevance and wishful thinking: Facilitation and distortion in source monitoring”. Memory & Cognition, Austin. 37(4), pp.434-447. Billikopf, Gregoria. (2009). “Conflict Management Skills”. University of California. Retrieved 23 Oct 2009 from http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7labor/13.htm Casriel, Erika. (2007). “Stepping Out”. Psychology Today, 40(2), pp.69-77. Eiconsortium.org. (1998). “Emotional Competence Framework”. Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations. Retrieved 24 Oct 2009 from http://www.eiconsortium.org/reports/emotional_competence_framework.html. Hargrave, Jan. (2008). “Do you speak body language?”. Forensic Examiner, Springfield. 17(3), pp.17-23. Lawson, Willow. (2006). “The eyes don’t have it”. Psychology Today, 39(1), p.24. Mathis, R. and Jackson, J. (2005). Human Resource Management, 10th ed. Thomson South-Western. Paris, Bernard J. (2002). “Karen Horney’s Vision of the Self”. Retrieved 25 Oct 2009 from http://plaza.ufl.edu/bjparis/essays/paris_self.html. Phillips, Joseph. (2007). CAPM/PMP Project Management Certification Exam Guide: All-in-One Certification Series. McGraw-Hill Professional. Pitts-Taylor, Victoria. (2008). Cultural Encyclopedia of the Body. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group. Rogers, Carl. (2009). “Self and Ideal Self and Congruence” Class Powerpoint Lecture. Weiten, W. and Lloyd, M. (2005). Psychology Applied to Modern Life, Adjustment in the 21st Century. 7th ed. Thomson Wadsworth. Read More