Communication as Critical Thing in Running Day-To-Day Affairs Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays

Introduction

In any organizational setup, communication is critical in running day-to-day affairs. Both external and internal components of contacts need to be handled appropriately to ensure efficiency in achieving the organization's goals and objectives. To this end, there is a need to develop an effective communication strategy that will provide a holistic planning approach in engaging all the players to achieve better effectiveness and satisfaction for all. It is, however, fair to acknowledge that there can never be organizational communication without conflict. Conflict refers to the process of social interaction or social situations where participants' interests and activities, whether individual or group, confront, thereby blocking and disabling the realization of their objectives (Spaho, 2013). Conflicts within an organization are expected and sometimes healthy since it indicates the presence of diversity in opinions that can be well harnessed to become more effective and, consequently, achieve an organization's goals. However, it is essential to note that it is dangerous for an organization to have so many conflicts, which may derail its focus on achieving its goals. Conflicts should exist only at manageable levels to be able to spur growth and incorporate diversity.

The purpose of this paper is to identify types of conflicts and explore how these conflicts can be solved by employing the use of effective communication techniques. It will focus on possible reasons why conflict occurs, the positive and negative effects of wars. It will also investigate conflict management methods, exploring the role of personality types and the role of forgiveness, mediation, and arbitration on conflict management. It will draw reference from personal experience and a conflict experience while serving as a department's college head. There was a lack of a common understanding between department heads, who formed part of the management team. The teaching staff members also lacked ethics on student management matters that directly contributed to students' discipline and performance.

Reasons why conflict occur

The following are the significant factors that contribute to conflicts in an organization.

Poor communication

According to Isa (2015), poor communication is the primary cause of conflicts between employees and their management. Failure to give adequate and timely communication in the workplace makes employees operate on assumptions resulting in clashes that could have easily been avoided. In the college conflict, lack of communication was commonly witnessed when a new staff member is recruited. Still, the department head under which the new staff member falls fails to provide proper communication on how the timetable runs and the teaching documents that the new staff member was to prepare and submit within a given timeframe. It led to the late submission of these documents and the documents themselves being prepared in a substandard manner. New staff members also occasionally failed to attend classes as scheduled, leading to incidences of disciplinary actions being taken against them. It bred feelings of animosity between these members and their heads of departments.

Differences in personality

The experience, background, and style of operation of a person affect how they perform in their relationships with other staff members. When an employee fails to understand the personality features, the approach they might use might breed conflict. When ahead of a department who has a straightforward personality corrects a lecturer in that manner, it might be taken a sign of rudeness. It was a common occurrence in the institution and resulted in a lack of morale, which eventually impacted some students' performance.

Stress

The work of effectively delivering as per the requirement of the institution's goals sometimes took a toll on the teaching staff. They had a tight deadline to complete the coursework, submit their teaching documents, set exams, and attend to other students' needs. The immense pressure on the teaching staff created high-stress levels that often manifested intense exchanges between them and departments' heads.

Huge workload

The lecture hours of staff members from individual departments, especially those with a higher student population, were relatively high. The heads of the department, on the other hand, had fewer lecture hours due to the additional administrative duties that were assigned to them. It made the teaching staff feel overburdened while seeing this as an unbalanced workload distribution that favored departments' heads. With this idea in mind, most lecturers avoided in-depth coursework coverage, producing candidates that were not fully prepared to handle examinations or assignments given to them by supervisors during their internship periods.

High handedness by the management team

Most heads of departments were extremely strict in enforcing their ideas in the running of their departments. Teaching staff under those departments felt sidelined and excluded from giving their inputs, and some resorted to defying the imposed ideas by their immediate bosses. Amid this conflict, students from these departments failed to get quality service from the persons charged with attending to them.

Positive and negative effects of conflicts

According to Omisore and Abiodun (2014), the effects of conflicts are broadly similar despite the conflict's nature, whether superior versus subordinate, between department heads or even groups within the organization. The common assumption is a conflict only produces adverse effects. It is not the case since, if well handled, and competition can be the genesis of developing positive strategies to enhance communication. The adverse effects of war are categorized as follows;

Psychological responses. The adverse psychological reactions to conflict include lack of interest in work, job dissatisfaction, work anxiety, frustration, and alienation from other staff (Omisore and Abiodun 2014). As witnessed in the conflict experienced in the college workplace, many teaching staff spent most of their time on the internet applying for other jobs. Their reason is a lack of interest in the position they were holding. Incidences of lecturers clashing with students and handing heavy punishments to the students and other forms of student victimization were common; this was mainly attributed to the frustration the lecturers experienced and resorted to using the students as scapegoats to vent their frustrations. It negatively impacted the performance of the students. Most of them developed and negative attitude towards these lecturers and ended up reporting to their heads of departments, further worsening the already bad situation. The students' discipline levels also started to decline due to this strained relationship between them and the affected lecturers. Overall, the case impacted the institution's objectives, which was primarily based on good customer service; the main customers, who are the students, were not receiving the assistance as envisaged by the institution's goals. Most of these lecturers started attending to their classes more as a formality than to deliver; they never went out of their way to coach students and got the best out of them. They organized themselves into cocoons and detached themselves from the authoritative heads of departments and their ideas. They never pulled in the same direction.
Behavioral responses. Many employees exhibit certain behaviors that are a manifestation of the conflict in the workplace. These may include excessive smoking, irregular eating patterns, alcoholism, decreased communication, and resisting influence attempts (Omisore, 2014). In the college conflict, the affected teaching staff started portraying certain behaviors such as intentional late coming for meetings convened by the department's head. They detach themselves from the ongoing discussions, never contributing to any list, including those that directly affect the classes they teach, indicating body language signs that show boredom and frequently excusing themselves to attend to other things before the meeting is concluded. Some failed to enforce college rules and regulations while listening to their classes, allowing students who did not have lecture clearance to attend lectures and sometimes even pardoned students under their supervision during exams. They would throw jibes at colleagues assigned specific tasks by the department's head and be a no-show in all the department's events. It created a picture of a divided team, with players antagonizing each other instead of supplementing each other's efforts.

Despite this grim picture painted by the adverse effects of conflicts, there are also some positives that competition can create. These include;

Improvement of future communication. Most of the heads of departments who had clashed with their staff members learned from this and changed their communication strategy. With other management team members' help, a better communication channel was effected, and the levels of conflicts were considerably reduced. An induction program for new staff members was formulated, and it became more comfortable for the process to be carried out even in the absence of the head of the department. The teaching staff members were more involved in the decision-making process of issues that directly affected their departments.
It led to better coordination among members of staff and across departments. Solved conflicts create room for tasks to be performed in a more coordinated manner. Heads of departments would assign roles to the teaching staff, and they started feeling more appreciated and more involved in making their departments better. Thus, the departments' running became a more collaborative process involving the teaching staff and departments' heads.
Conflicts facilitate a better understanding of the problems people have and the personalities they possess. Because of the increasing frequency of the rows, there was a need to organize leadership training for the department heads to sharpen their skills in working better with their members by better understanding their members' needs. After being taken through leadership training, heads of departments were more effective in accommodating staff members' personalities under their departments. They were more considerate of while giving feedback or assigning responsibilities and other tasks. In return, these staff members were more civil in dealing with their students, creating an environment of peace and order.
Conflicts add variety to the life of an organization and create room creativity and innovation. Divergent opinions and approaches, if well handled, can provide an opportunity to have an alternative way of solving challenges. When the heads of departments started assigning roles to their staff and incorporating their input in the institution's running, many ideas were introduced that helped tame student declining performance and discipline. It proved that no leader has a monopoly of knowledge to run their area of jurisdiction. The involvement of the team members makes their work easy.

Conflict Management

As earlier stated, an organization can't run without the emergence of conflict. Therefore, the focus should be the proper use of a strategy, including a communication strategy that will bring acceptable solutions.

Role of personality type in conflict management

According to Anwar (2012), the strategy adopted in managing conflicts varies from person to person. Since war is caused by human interaction, an organization needs to understand its employees' personality types and put a system that takes care of this during conflict resolution.

Extraversion is a personality dimension that refers to friendly, assertive, and talkative people with a strong desire for domination, power, and affiliation. This category of people are forceful in the assertion of their ideas and are quick to anger. They can easily cause conflicts, and they require supervision to put them in check. They should also be put together with those who are softer to avoid confrontation. Neuroticism constitutes a calmer, emotionally unstable; these people have limited social networks and should not be assigned managerial tasks (Anwar 2012). It will help in reducing conflicts with their colleagues. The conscientious category incorporates people who are more responsible, persistent, organized, disciplined, and diligent. They are more achievement-oriented and are better placed to handle most managerial roles. They create minimal conflict in their interaction with colleagues and other team members.

Forgiveness, mediation, and arbitration

Forgiveness is a potent remedy in the management of conflict. It works best when the victim knows the offender's identity, and the offender has acknowledged his wrongdoing (Satne, 2016). Because of the difference in personality types, someone can offend a colleague without knowing. In such instances where no malice was intended, forgiveness plays a more significant role in solving the conflict. It is worth noting. However, that forgiveness alone is not enough, and more effort need to be put by the offender to avoid reoccurrence of such incidents. In the college conflict, one approach was adopted where heads of departments and the teaching staff were required to be more considerate of each other's personalities and situations. Each party was expected to seek for forgiveness in cases where their actions unjustifiably went beyond being cordial.

Mediation is an intervention in a conflict of an acceptable third party with limited or no authoritative decision-making power, who assists the involved parties in voluntarily reaching a mutually acceptable agreement (Buon, 2014). With the involvement of a third party, issues can be dissected and solutions found. In instances where conflicts between the heads of departments and teaching staff went were threatening the stability of effective service delivery, the campus registrar would bring the parties together and an amicable solution.

Arbitration is similar to mediation, but unlike mediation, the third party gives the final verdict in the conflict. The parties to the battle no longer have the power to decide the issue on their own. Unless extremely necessary, arbitration should be avoided in disputes within the organization since it does not solve the tension between the [arties involved in the conflict. The principal always encouraged staff members and department heads to have regular consultations and meetings to avoid and manage disputes.

Conclusion

Conflicts within an organization are normal, healthy, and should be expected. However, it should be managed not to affect the quality of service that an organization provides to its clients. For this to happen, the factors that trigger these conflicts need to be identified. These factors need to be understood, and proper management strategies are put in place to check on them. In managing these factors, it is vital to understand the organization's staff members' personalities and work with them so that conflicts emanating from them are minimal, healthy, and manageable. The use of alternative dispute resolution approaches through forgiveness, mediation, and arbitration can also help manage organizational conflict if adequately handled. Of importance to note is that the development of effective communication techniques is crucial in managing disputes. All the measures discussed are attached to effective communication.

Communication as Critical Thing in Running Day-To-Day Affairs - Essay Example

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