W14 - Discussion Question # 2

Every day we encounter conflict and how we handle the conflict can determine the health of the relationship between our small group members. Personally, I think I deal with the most conflict at work because of the group dynamic that is there with all the different personalities. There are eight staff members and three management team members, including myself. Every month we are given goals to meet both individually and as a branch team. In the first quarter, business was really slow and we were unable to meet any of our assigned goals. This caused concern for our upper management and we were told that we needed to increase our sales and meet at least some of our goals in order to substantiate our staffing size. As a team we worked together and collaboratively tackled the issue of our poor sales numbers head on and tried to find new ways we can increase our business. Because of the combined efforts of everyone, we were able to make a dramatic turnaround within the first two weeks of April. Everyone was happy because we were able to work together and reap the rewards as a whole.


On the other hand, there have been times at work where instead of collaboratively working with my team, I have turned to a more competitive conflict resolution style. Every week, my manager, the supervisor, and myself would get together to discuss what was going on with the staff and the branch. There would be times when we would have to discuss certain issues, operational or human resource items that would come up and my manager would leave it up to us to see how we would like to handle the situation. I feel like because it is just the two of us, it causes more of a competition, where we both want to be able to present our manager with a better idea and in some ways outdo the other person. Sometimes, we may even be blindsided with our own pride and more focused on the competition than on actually solving the problem at hand. I think that under all circumstances, collaborative conflict resolution is much better than competitive conflict resolution because everyone wins and feels better knowing that they helped to contribute to solve a conflict and leaves feeling satisfied with the overall outcome.