Organizational Conflict - Personal Conflict

Personal Conflict

A conflict between two people, most often from a mutual dislike or personality clash. According to Boston University FSAO, "Causes for workplace conflict can be personality or style differences and personal problems such as substance abuse, childcare issues, and family problems. Organizational factors such as leadership, management, budget, and disagreement about core values can also contribute."

Conflict styles are typically seen as a response to particular situations. By contrast, we argue that individual conflict styles may shape an employee's social environment, affecting the level of ongoing conflict and thus his or her experience of stress. Using data from a hospital-affiliated clinical department, we find that those who use a more integrative style experience lower levels of task conflict, reducing relationship conflict, which reduces stress. Those who use a more dominating or avoiding style experience higher levels of task conflict, increasing relationship conflict and stress. We conclude that an employee's work environment is, in part, of his or her own making.

Intragroup conflict research has shown that conflict can be beneficial for the performance of student groups (Jehn, 1994) as well as organization groups (Jehn, 1995; Pelled 1996), if the conflict is task-focused. In fact, one of the ideas that had the greatest influence in moving the research on organizational conflict forward, and allowing researchers to empirically examines whether conflict is negative or positive in workgroups, was the distinction between task-related and personal or relationship-focused conflict (Amason, 1996; Jehn 1995, 1997; Pelled, 1996). More recently, research on organizational conflict has focused primarily on three types of conflict: relationship, task, and process (e.g., Amason, 1996; Jehn et al. 1999; Pelled, 1996) and four conflict dimensions (emotions, importance, resolution efficacy, and norms; Jehn et al. 2008b). Relationship conflicts reflect disagreements and incompatibilities among group members about personal issues that are not task related, such as social event’s gossip, and world news.

Conflict management styles have been related to the quality of agreement reached during negotiations and other conflict management episodes, but the impact of conflict styles may be much broader than that. We argue that conflict management styles can have a pervasive effect on work life in organizations, by impacting the degree to which an employee experiences ongoing conflict. Conflict levels, in turn, affect the amount of stress felt by individual employees. Previous research has shown that people with different dispositions tend to create different social environments for themselves. Thus, a person's "situation" depends not only on external conditions, but also on his or her own approach to people and problems. Similarly, experience of conflict is not just a function of external conditions, but also of the conflict management styles that people bring to bear on problems at work.

Conflict sometimes has a destructive effect on the individuals and groups involved. At other times, however, conflict can increase the capacity of those affected to deal with problems, and therefore it can be used as a motivating force toward innovation and change. Conflict is encountered in two general forms. Personal conflict refers to an individual's inner workings and personality problems.

Many difficulties in this area are beyond the scope of management and more in the province of a professional counselor, but there are some aspects of personal conflict that managers should understand and some they can possibly help remedy. Social conflict refers to interpersonal, intragroup, and intergroup differences.

It was pointed out that there is a basic incompatibility between the authority and structure of formal organizations and the human personality. Human behavior cannot be separated from the culture that surrounds it.