Conflict Styles: Compromise

Yes, I believe compromising has been the best options for me when it comes to conflict. I was working on this project where we had to migrate around one hundred reports from one version of software to another and we were having many issues in them. Some people were working towards coding, others worked on formatting and so on. Conflict came when we had to provide the final version of the reports and one team started to blame other that because of what they did reports were not coming out right. That was one tough situation. My approach was to just compromise with what this other team had said and agree to work together, showing them how I did what I did and make them changes in reports accordingly without messing the real outlook of the reports. I compromised with some of their approach and they did on some on mine, so that worked for both of us and problem got solved.

Stress, Burnout, and Support

I have been going through this a lot lately. Now a days when economy is going down, managers are announcing news of being laid off to people everyday. In this time of the year, when one is loaded with the work of three and still told that yes you are doing great and keep doing the good work; he does feel stressed. Why? Because in this situation people are showing him that they have expectations from him and he really needs to keep working this hard. This situation of working too hard to meet the expectations of higher people in the company is Burnout in my understanding. But if a worker is working real hard but still unable to make the managers happy, and when he hears that you can do better than this, then he really feels stressed. Carrying the huge load of tasks on his back, and still being unable to satisfy his managers.. This has been my case for past few weeks and when I got a little support from my peers that gave me some additional help, I felt kind of relaxed. Friends can always become a good holding hand..

Intergroup Conflict

Many times in the organizations conflicts occur among the people from the same group or team they work in. Why? Because as our textbook says that conflict occurs when many people try to reach a goal through different approaches. So now if my approach of attaining a given task is a bit different than my peer then we certainly are going to have a conflict. Usually in this case both of the parties feel that they are correct and their opinion should be given precedence and when one gets his or her opinion chosen, the other one feels not appreciated or in some situations degraded. This person might feel hurt and in other cases not even show interest in getting the job done to show others that the idea other person rose was not the best one and hence it failed in getting the job done. I have seen this many time in my life and a good lead usually try to keep his/her team members in sync without getting personal about any task and making everyone feel involved.

Resistance: Subtle Forms (Hidden Transcripts)

Many organizations when enforce rules against the will of employees face resistance. As mentioned in the book, resistance could be of many types, like strikes, walking out o meeting etc but what I find most interesting is the hidden resistance. One thing I have seen at many places is that people start stealing from the property of company, saying that company doesn't pay what they deserve and make them work a lot more than normal hours. I believe company owners should pay much importance to the matters when it comes to employee satisfaction. Of course, not to an extend that tilts the balance but to a level that is just enough for both employee and employer.

Organizational Control: Technical

As we all know that technology has provided us several new ways of organizational control and most of the job is done by high technology devices. But are the employees feeling comfortable in this environment? In my personal opinion, no. We all know that its natural not to be working every single second of your work. We all sometimes chat with colleagues, check our emails and even make a personal phone call to check on few things. But how would one feel knowing that his or her every move has been recorded? Of course not good at all. So in this case the employee will feel under pressure of being watched by the higher authorities and not be able to perform with ease and confidence. At my workplace most of the websites have been blocked as well to limit the people to use work related web-sites only. I think that is like telling the employees that we own you and in the time we pay you to work for us, you should be doing a single thing else.

For me personally it has been a cause of nervousness and stress so I can say that control should be there but to an appropriate level.

Power: Can it be misused?

Sometimes given too much power and control to an employee doesnt turn out to be the most productive option. It has been reported that many employees when left on their own slacked a lot in their work and tend to waste time and didnt even showed up to work. So in this case what can we tell to the people supporting the concept of employee power? But at the same time taking away all the power from them and pushing them to the tasks can make them less productive as well. I like to be given some room and authority to work on my tasks, so that I feel at ease and confident. So in my opinion, giving power to the employees could be both beneficial and if in access, harmful for the organization.

Teamwork: Why Doesnt It Always Succeed?!?!

I have been working for many organization for the past 3-4 years. In this time I have observed that even though the concept of teamwork is very good, i.e. to get a task done as a group but it doesn't always succeed. And the same job, if done individually, could have been very successful. There are different reasons I observed in this regard. One thing was the jealousy among different team members and specially among team leader and the group members. Usually other members of the team feel that they were the better option for being a team lead but this other person got lucky and became his/her team lead. Due to this very factor team members try to put others down in some cases. Also its very common that once given authority, team lead tries to take advantage of it and instead of he/she himself doing his/her work, put it on the team members. This also leads to a bad team work and project sinks. So I believe that even though there are many benefits of teamwork but it also has some drawbacks attached. So a manager should give much importance to the matter before assigning it to the team, that does this task really needs a teamwork or it can be done individually.