HRDQ.COM - More About Team Conflict Strategies

Overview

The learning goal for those completing the Team Conflict Strategies Inventory is to develop productive norms within their work groups for managing disagreements and to develop some procedures for dealing with more serious conflicts. The Team Conflict Strategies Inventory provides an ideal opportunity to work through any old, unresolved issues that may be draining energy from a team's efforts.

People cannot work together for very long without disagreements on goals, priorities, and alternative solutions to problems. This is especially true in teams where team members are dependent on one another to complete their work. Sometimes team disagreements can become serious conflicts, threatening the productivity or even the life of the group. But if a team can use effective strategies for handling conflict, it may actually afford new learning and eventually deeper, more productive relationships.

Whether conflict is positive or negative is dependent on how the team generally handles its conflicts. Teams develop characteristic ways of managing conflict, which we refer to as their conflict strategies. Each team tends to have one or two conflict strategies with which they are most comfortable.

The Team Conflict Strategies Inventory Model is based on five strategies that can be described in terms of two stages:

Integrating: Teams face their conflicts and disagreements. Conflicts are viewed as problems that need to be solved.
Compromising: Teams find ways to meet each other halfway. No one needs to give up everything. Everyone gets something.
Competing: Team members (and the leader) use rank, seniority, or other forms with leverage to suppress disagreements.
Smoothing: Teams place group harmony and solidarity above everything. When disagreements arise, teams joke them away.
Avoiding: Teams don't discuss their disagreements or conflicts. Teams pretend they don't exist and go on about their business.

In Stage 1, the parties realize that their goals are not compatible. A decision is made about how to handle the conflict. In Stage 2, the parties' goals are either met or unmet.

Team members can choose to confront the conflict head on or not. Non-confrontational approaches such as Avoiding and Smoothing do nothing to further the team's position in the conflict. If the team chooses to confront the conflict, team members may take this approach by Competing, Compromising, or Integrating. Each strategy has its positives and negatives.

It should be noted that whatever strategy one party chooses, the other party to the conflict may or may not use the same strategy. We have focused the Team Conflict Strategies Inventory on the simplest situations in which one strategy prevails, in order to present the straightforward effects of each strategy.