As I said earlier, as a leader you will find that you'll spend a considerable portion of your time resolving conflicts. So in that regard, it's worth taking a moment to look at the impact of conflict on your organization and then analyze the sources of that conflict. If we look at the impact of conflict on the organization, we might imagine that at the low end of the scale, low conflict, this is an area where conflict is avoided. Over time, this can have a significant negative impact on the organization as frustrations build up. As the ability to address that conflict are not taken care of, and this certainly would result in low efficiency in the organization. At the high end of the conflict scale, here the high emotional level and intensity of those emotions is going to result in what I call organizational churn, turmoil in the organization. And at this point, again, the effectiveness of the organization drops off very low. So we see at both ends of the scale, organizational effectiveness is low. So somewhere in between, there must be an optimum. Where is that level of conflict that allows you to get the work done and yet prevents damage to relationships rr damage to getting the work done that needs to be done? This particular point is different from organization to organization. Your challenge as a leader is going to be find that optimum so that your organization manages that level of conflict while still getting work done. Now let's look closer at conflict. And as we analyze it, we're going to be looking for the focus of the conflict and the sources. As we think about the focus of the conflict, this really refers to, is this a people centered or is it an issue centered focus. For people focused ones,these are interpersonal conflicts could result from personality differences,values differences and these are going to be the ones that are the most challenging to resolve. Because frequently,severe people focused conflict will result in damaging, permanently damaging, relationships. Issue-focused conflicts tend to be easier to resolve as facts and reason can often be used to help resolve these kinds of conflicts. Now let's shift our attention to the sources of conflict. The first of these is personal differences. These could be personality, values, or even generational differences. We could be operating under different sets of information or even misinformation. This can cause confusion and frustration and thus, result in conflict. Sometimes our goals are incompatible with our role in the organization. We may be asked to do things that are just not appropriate for our particular role in the organization. That again creates tension, frustration, and potentially conflict. There may be conditions within our organization that can induce stress as well. Typical examples of these are when organizations are trying to operate under austere conditions and there are budget or resource constraints. Or even in economic hard times when there are threats of staff reductions. Those are all cases where stress in the organization can go up and conflict can be an outcome.
