Organizational Behavior
Chapter 11
Conflict and negotiation in the workplace

Meaning and consequences of conflict

Conflict: the process in which one party perceives that its interests are being opposed or negatively affected by another party.

Conflict is ultimately based on perceptions. It exists whenever one party believes that another might obstruct its efforts, regardless of whether the other party actually intends to do so.

Is conflict good or bad?

Conflict can have negative consequences under some circumstances:

• Reducing employee performance by consuming otherwise productive time
• Stressful
• Increases job dissatisfaction
• People who experience conflict tend to reduce their information sharing and other forms of coordination with each other.
• Conflict fuels organizational politics
• Conflict may undermine team cohesion and performance

Benefits of conflict

Optimal conflict perspective: organizations are most effective when employees experience some level of conflict, but becomes less effective with high levels of conflict.

• Conflict energizes people to debate issues and evaluative alternatives more thoroughly.
  They probe and test each other’s way of thinking to better understand the underlying issues that need to be addressed.
• Moderate levels of conflict prevent organizations from becoming nonresponsive to their external environment.
• When team members have a dispute or competition with external sources, this represents and external challenge that potentially increases cohesion within the team.

The emerging view: task and relationship conflict

There are various types of conflicts with different consequences.
The two dominant types are:

• Task conflict: a type of conflict in which people focus their discussion around the issue while showing respect for people who have other points of view. Constructive conflict.
  Process conflict → how the work should be done and who should perform the various task roles.
  Functional
• Relationship conflict: a type of conflict in which people focus on characteristics of other individuals, rather than on the issues, as the source of conflict.
  Dysfunctional

Separating task form relationship conflict

Separating task form relationship conflict is not easy.
Three conditions potentially minimize the level of relationship conflict during task conflict episodes:

• Emotional intelligence and emotional stability.
• Cohesive team
• Supportive team norms

Conflict process model

Sources of conflict.
At some point, the sources of conflict lead one or both parties to perceive that conflict exists. These perceptions usually interact with emotions experienced about the conflict.
Conflict perceptions and emotions produce manifest conflict, the decisions and behaviors of one party toward the other.
Conflict episodes may range from subtle nonverbal behaviors to warlike aggression.
Conflict is behaviorally revealed by the style each side uses to resolve the conflict.

Sources of conflict → conflict perceptions and emotions → manifest conflict → (sometimes back to perceptions and emotions and so on) → conflict outcomes

Structural sources of conflict in organizations

Six main conditions:

• Incompatible goals
• Differentiation
• Interdependence
• Scare resources
• Ambiguous rules
• Communication problems

Incompatible goals

When the goals of one person or department seem to interfere with another person’s or department’s goals.

Differentiation

Differences among people and work units regarding their training, values, beliefs, and experiences.

Interdependence

Conflict is inherently about relationships because people and work units are affected by others only when they have some level of interdependence.
The risk of conflict increases with the level of interdependence.

Scare resources

Each person or unit requiring the same resource necessarily undermines others who also need that resource to fulfill their goals.

Ambiguous rules

Uncertainty increases the risk that one party intends to interfere with the other party’s goals.
Encourages political tactics and, in some cases, employees enter a free-for-all battle to win decisions in their favor.

Communication problems

The lack of opportunity, ability, or motivation to communicate effectively.

• When two parties lack the opportunity to communicate, they tend to rely more on stereotypes to understand the other party in the conflict.
• Some people lack the necessary skills to communicate in a diplomatic, nonconfrontational manner.
• Relation conflict is uncomfortable, so people are less motivated to communicate with others in a disagreement.

Interpersonal conflict-handling styles

The six sources of conflict lead to conflict perceptions and emotions that, in turn, motivate people to respond in some way to the conflict.

How people respond behaviorally to a conflict situation depends on the relative importance they place in maximizing outcomes for themselves and for the other party.

• Problem solving
  Tries to find a solution that is beneficial for both parties.
  Win-win orientation: the belief that conflicting parties will find a mutually beneficial solution to their disagreement.
  Information sharing is an important feature of this style.
• Forcing
  Tries to win the conflict at the other’s expense.
  Win-lose orientation: the belief that conflicting parties are drawing from a fixed pie, so the more one party receives, the less the other party will receive.
  Relies on assertiveness and other hard influence tactics to get one’s own way.
• Avoiding
  Tries to smooth over or evade conflict situations altogether.
  Does not necessarily mean that we have a low concern for both one’s and the other party’s interest.
• Yielding
  Giving in completely to the other side’s wishes, or at least cooperating with little or no attention to your own interests.
  Involves making unilateral concessions and unconditional promises.
• Compromising
  Involves looking for a position in which your losses are offset by equally valued gains.
  Actively searching for a middle ground between the interests of the two parties.

Choosing the best conflict-handling style

People usually gravitate toward on or two conflict-handling styles that match their personality, personal and cultural values, and past experience.
The best style depends on the situation.

Cultural and gender differences in conflict-handling styles

Cultural differences are more than just a source of conflict. They influence the preferred conflict-handling style.
Men and women also rely on different conflict-handling styles to some degree.

• Men are more likely to use the forcing style.
• Females are more likely to use the avoiding style

Compared to men, women pay more attention to the relationship between the parties.

Structural approaches to conflict management

Conflict management also involves altering the underlying structural causes of potential conflict.

Empathizing superordinate goals

Superordinate goals: goals that the conflicting parties value and whose attainment requires the joint resources and effort of those parties.

Reducing differentiation

As people develop common experiences and beliefs, they become more motivated to coordinate activities and resolve their disputes through constructive discussion.

Improving communication and mutual understanding

To give the conflicting parties more opportunities to communicate and understand each other.
But

• These interventions should be applied only where differentiation is sufficiently low or after differentiation has been reduced.
• People in collectivist and high power distance cultures are less comfortable with the practice of resolving differences through direct and open communication.

Reducing distance

Minimize the level of interdependence between the parties.
Three ways to reduce interdependence among employees:

• Create buffers
  A buffer is any mechanism that loosens the coupling between tow or more people or work units.
• Use integrators
  Employees who coordinate the activities of work units toward the completion of a shared task of project.
  Reduces the amount of direct interaction required among diverse work units.
• Combine jobs

Increasing resources

Clarifying rules and procedures

Third-party conflict resolution

Third-party conflict resolution: any attempt by a relatively neutral person to help conflicting parties resolve their differences.
Three main third-party dispute resolution activities

• Arbitration:
  Arbitrators have high control over the final decision, but low control over the process.
  Executives engage in this strategy by following previously agreed-upon rules of due process, listening to arguments form the disputing employees, and making a binding decision.
• Inquisition
  Inquisitors control all discussion about the conflict. Determine how to resolve the conflict. They also choose which information to examine and how to examine it, and they generally decide how the conflict resolution process will be handles.
• Mediation
  Mediators have high control over the intervention process.
  Their main purpose is tho manage the process and context of interaction between the disputing parties. But, the parties make the final decision about how to resolve their differences.

Choosing the best third-party intervention strategy.

Research suggests that managers and other people in positions of authority usually adopt an inquisitional approach whereby they dominate the intervention process as well as make a binding decision.
It is consistent with the decision-oriented nature of managerial jobs.

Inquisition is usually the least effective third-party conflict resolution method in organizational settings.

• Leaders who take an inquisitional role tend to collect limited information about the problem, so their imposed decision may produce an ineffective solution to the conflict.
• Employees often view inquisitional procedures and outcomes as unfair because they have little control over this approach

Which third-party approach is most appropriate in organizations?

• Partly depends on the situation
• More favorable results when it applies the procedural justice practices

Generally speaking, for everyday disagreements between two employees, the mediation approach is usually the best because it gives employees more responsibility for resolving their won disputes.

Resolving conflict through negotiation

Negotiation: the process whereby two or more conflicting parties attempt to resolve their divergent goals by redefining the terms of their interdependence.
People negotiate when they think that discussion can produce a more satisfactory arrangement in their exchange of goods or services.

Distributive versus integrative approaches to negotiation

Distributive
In negotiations, those involved in the conflict must distribute portions from a fixed pie.

Integrative or mutual gains
Then negotiators believe the resources at stake are expandable rather than fixed if the parties work creatively together to find a solution.

When do negotiators adopt a distributive or integrative approach to negotiations?

• The situation
• Individual’s personality and past experiences

Preparing to negotiate

Preparation is essential for successful negotiations.

Develop goals and understand needs

Successful negotiators develop goals about what they want to achieve from the exchange.
They reflect on what needs they are trying to fulfill from those goals.
Also anticipating the other party’s goals and their underlying needs, based on available information before negotiation sessions begin.

Negotiators engage in a form of goals setting that identifies three key positions:

• Initial, what they will initially request in the negotiations
• Target, what they want to achieve in the best possible situation
• Resistance, what minimum acceptable result they will accept

These tree are shown for each party in the bargaining zone model.

The initial offer point, each party’s offer to the other side, requires careful consideration because it can influence the negotiation outcome.

Target point: your realistic goal or expectation for a final agreement.
This position must consider alternative strategies to achieve those objectives, and test underlying assumptions about the situation.

Know your BATNA and power

Best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA): the best outcome you might achieve through some other course of action if you abandon the current negotiation.

Having more than one BATNA to a negotiation increases your power.
A common problem is that people tend to overestimate their BATNA.

The negotiation process

Gather information

Information is the cornerstone of effective negotiations.
Some types of information reveal the other party’s resistance point.
Mutual gains may be possible with more information.
Successful negotiations require both parties to volunteer information.

The most important practices for gathering information in negotiations are to listen and ask questions.
Skilled negotiator communicate their inner thoughts and feelings about what the other party has said.

Manage concessions

Successful negotiators make fewer concessions and each concession is smaller than those of average negotiators.
Concessions are a form of communication because they signal to the other party the relative importance of each issue being negotiated.
Concessions also symbolize each party’s motivation to bargain in good faith.
Concessions are necessary for the parties to move toward the area to agreement.
Concessions need to be clearly labeled as such and should be accompanied by an expectation that the other party will reciprocate.

Some type of offers and concessions are better than others.

• The key objective is to discover and signal which issues are more and less important to each side.
  • One way to figure out the relative importance of the issues to each party is to make multi-issue offers rather than discuss one issue at a time.

Manage time

Negotiators tend to make more concessions as the deadline gets closer.

Build the relationship

Building and maintaining trust is important in all negotiations.

The negotiation setting

The effectiveness of negotiating depends to some extent on the environment in which the negotiations occur.

• Location
• Physical setting
• Audience characteristics

Gender and negotiation

When it comes to negotiation, women tend to have poorer economic outcomes than do men.