COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES.
Introduction
In any organizational setup, communication is very key in running the day-to-day affairs. Both external and internal components of communications need to be properly handled to ensure efficiency in the achievement of goals and objectives of the organization. To this end, there is a need to develop an effective communication strategy that will ensure 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 normal 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 important to note that it is dangerous for an organization to have so many conflicts, as this may derail the focus of the organization towards the achievement of 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 conflicts. 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 college head of the department where 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 matters relating to student management that directly contributed to the discipline and performance of students within the institution.
Reasons why conflict occur
The following are the major factors that contribute to conflicts in an organization.
Poor communication
According to Isa (2015), poor communication is the major cause of conflicts between employees in an organization and between employees and the organization’s management. Failure to give effective and timely communication in the workplace makes employees operate on assumptions resulting in clashes that could have easily been avoided. In the case of the college conflict, lack of communication was normally 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 within an organization. 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 certain departments, especially those with a higher student population, were quite high. The heads of the department, on the other hand, had fewer lecture hours due to the other administrative duties that were assigned to them. This 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 largely similar despite the conflict’s nature, whether superior versus subordinate, between heads of department or even groups within the organization. The common assumption is a conflict only produces negative effects. It is not the case since, if well handled, conflict can be the genesis of developing positive strategies to enhance communication within the organization. The negative effects of conflict are categorized as follows;
- Psychological responses. The negative psychological responses 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 job 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 worsen due to this strained relationship between them and the affected lecturers. Overall, the situation impacted the institution’s objectives, which was largely based on good customer service; the main customers, who are the students, were not receiving the service 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 meetings, 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 attending to their classes, allowing students who did not have lecture clearance to attend lectures and sometimes even pardoned students under their supervision during exams even though these students had engaged in examination irregularities. They would throw jibes at colleagues assigned certain tasks by the head of the department and be a no-show in all events organized by the department’s head. 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 negative effects of conflicts, there are also some positives that conflict 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 the help of other management team members, 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 easier 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 running of the departments became a more collaborative process involving the teaching members of staff and the heads of departments.
- Conflicts facilitate a better understanding of the problems people have and the personalities they possess. Because of the increasing frequency of the conflicts, there was a need to organize leadership training for the heads of departments to sharpen their skills on how they could work better with their members through a better understanding of their members’ needs. After being taken through leadership training, heads of departments were more effective in accommodating the personalities of staff members 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 the way they dealt 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 solutions that are acceptable to all.
Role of personality type in conflict management
According to Anwar (2012), the strategy adopted in managing conflicts varies from person to person. Since conflict is caused by human interaction, an organization needs to understand its employees’ personality types and put in place 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 greater 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 situations 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 [arties to the conflict no longer have the power to decide the issue on their own. Unless extremely necessary, arbitration should be avoided in conflicts within the organization since it does not solve the tension between the [arties involved in the conflict. The principal always encouraged staff members and heads of departments to have regular consultations and meetings to avoid and manage conflicts.
Conclusion
Conflicts within an organization are normal, healthy, and should be expected. However, it should be managed so as 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 important to understand the personalities of members of the staff in the organization and work with them in such a way that conflicts emanating from them are minimal, healthy, and manageable. The use of alternative dispute resolution approaches through forgiveness, mediation, and arbitration can also be useful in managing organizational conflict if properly handled. Of importance to note is that the development of effective communication techniques is crucial in managing conflicts. All the measures discussed are attached to effective communication.
References.
Adamu Isa, Ahmed. (2015). Conflicts in Organizations: Causes and Consequences. Educational Policy and Entrepreneurial Research. 2. 2408-770.
Spaho, Kenan. (2013). Organizational communication and conflict management. 18. 103-118.
Anwar, Ch. Mahmood. (2012). Managing conflicts through personality management. African Journal of Business Management. 6. 10.5897/AJBM11.2601.
Satne, Paula. (2016). Forgiveness and Conflict. Philosophia. 44. 10.1007/s11406-016-9787-7.
Buon, Tony. (2014). The Art of Workplace Mediation: From Conflict to Engagement.
Bernard Oladosu, Omisore & Ashimi Rashidat, Abiodun (2014). Organizational conflicts: causes, effects, and remedies. International Journal of academic research and management sciences Vol. 3 No 6