Organizaitonal Behaviour - Communication and Conflict

...

Integration

Although these four articles focus on different parts on communication and conflict, they are complementary.Most leaderships come up with decisions through holding a majority of meetings to communicate with their employees and gather information by debating. Without communication and conflicts, leaderships just fight by themselves in economic markets. Is Silence Killing Your Company, written by Leslie A. Perlow and Stephanie Williams, demonstrates the importance of communication. This article not only explains why communication is significant but also testifies how employees can effectively break silence without make superiors lose face. Perlow identified severe costs of suffering in silence. In organizational behaviour, it is related to compromise in modes of managing conflict. Those employees who choose to keep opinions to themselves attempt to satisfice. However, Perlow and Williams do not illustrate how to tackle the conflicts after breaking silence and how to manage constructive conflicts. Breaking silence can bring vitality to organizations, and also can lead to conflicts simultaneously. Fortunately, two articles, Leadership is a conversation and How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight, respectively deal with how to effectively manage communication within organization through healthy debates.

Groysberg and Slind, authors of Leadership is a conversation, identify four elements of organizational conversation: intimacy, interactivity, inclusion, and intentionality. In terms of intimacy, listening well is identified to let leaders know when to listen and when to talk. Silence is not unnecessary. The point is when silence is needed during conversation. Silence in conversation can been seen as a signal of respect for other people. Every employee hope that their opinions can be considered even though they are not adopted eventually. Thus, some inner resentment of employees can be extinguished. In How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight, some more detail approaches are provided to solve conflicts among employees. Constructive conflict and interpersonal conflict are identified in articles to remind leaders which kind of conflict can result into good fight in debate. Based on pursuing the constructive conflict, leaders can apply those methods with a clear direction. Leadership is a conversation is more about the relationship between leadership and employees, discussing how they get closer, how they interact, how they fully expand their roles, and how they achieve a shared agenda. When leaders manage to get these four parts done, they can apply the approaches identified in How Management Teams Can Have a Good Fight. For example, when leaders can minimize the distances in a conversation and achieve intimacy, they can use humour to emphasize the excitement of challenging tasks rather than the stress of those.

When an organization are stepping onto global stage, managing multicultural teams is as important as holding good conversation. They are all about communication and conflict. The approaches identified by previous three articles can be applied to most organizations. However, not every company has a big enough scale to experience multicultural cooperation. Therefore, Managing Multicultural Teams specially demonstrate how to successfully communicate with team members with multicultural background. In organizational behaviour, some cultures are high-context, while other are relatively lower-context. People from low-context culture always develop straight talk, which means what they say are what they think. In contrast, if you chat with people from high-context culture, you need to guess what they actually want to say. Conflicts in multicultural team probably derive from this cultural differences. This is direct versus indirect communication stated by Brett.

Effectiveness

An author tells managers to understand that the performance of their team reflects on them. Learning to take the first step in accepting blame for a setback will encourage their subordinates to speak up and accept their part of the blame. This would help in recognising the problem and collectively finding a solution to it. Also the subordinates, who have probably been silenced by their boss, should try to present the issue or setback in another and perhaps more subtle way, understanding that their superior cannot do all the work alone. The author also encourages employees who for some reason cannot speak up to reach out to others with similar issues because there is power in number. When management recognises that it is not just a personal complaint, they tend to work quicker to resolve the issue.

Another author tells us about ways to encourage constructive conflict amongst team members without destroying their ability to work together as a team. He suggested working with more information so team members can focus on the facts of the project, developing more alternatives so to enrich the level of debate. He also suggested creating a common goal with which teams could tally, requiring everyone to share a vision. Finally, he suggested resolving issues without forcing a consensus. When team fails in reaching a consensus over an issue, the manager makes the decision, guided by input from the rest of the group.

Another author suggested that team members of a multicultural team should acknowledge their cultural differences and welcome to new ideas from their teammates. He also suggested managers intervening when the team cannot decide which alternative to pick. He acts as the judge and makes the final decision

Ineffectiveness

An author suggests employees act deviantly in their organization. Although, the act of deviance may give room for creativity and improvement; it could lead to conflict. He suggested an example where an employee could choose to ask tough questions at a company meeting where employees normally just accept management decisions. Encouraging this will also encourage other employees to do same, thereby prolonging company meetings and cutting into working hours which in turn reduces productivity. A better suggestion would have been for that employee to present his issue to a superior after the meeting, and that superior could take his suggestion in consideration without cutting into working hours.

Another author suggested that employees that believe that their team’s decision making process is fair are more likely to accept decisions without resentment, even when they do not agree with them. This suggestion may not be very effective as employees should always speak up when they do not agree with certain decision making process whether it is fair or not. By expressing themselves, better alternatives could be

...