Abstract
This research study the effect of conflict management on teamwork, the factors, and the recommendation for managing conflicts, also to know if it’s more common among females or males. First, we have an introduction about conflict management and the research questions, and then we go through the literature review by explaining and defining each of the conflict management, teamwork, and the five styles of conflict management and the research objectives and hypothesis. After that, we have the research method which we explain in it the relationship between the independent variable which is conflict management (avoiding the conflict, competition, accommodating, compromise, and collaborating) and the dependent variables which is teamwork, the method that we use is survey questionnaire, also the type of data that we use, the statistical measure, and the duration that we need.
Keywords: conflict management, teamwork
Introduction
In the work environment employees and employers should work together to achieve the business goals, and this means teamwork; teamwork is favored for a lot of reasons because there will be various skills and points of view from individuals which leads to higher performance and doing better in the job. It’s obvious that whenever people come to have communication there will be disagreements. And in many cases, it’s the way that people are responding to these disagreements that would cause a conflict situation as a result or not. In any organization the level of communication is very high that’s why the probability of conflict to arise is high also. The issue is not whether the conflict will occur, but it’s in how managers will respond to it. It’s difficult and challenging to find the right way to solve conflict situations and to manage them.
In a team, conflict may destroy relationships, decrease job satisfaction, and anxiety which leads to complaints to the managers. Also defining the conflict factors and causes and decides how to manage the conflict are tasks that a lot of managers don’t know, to find these factors are not easy it’s very difficult that’s why the managers need to find strategies to define and manage the conflict, by doing so we can build trust and honesty between the co-workers. Also one of the important points is to make sure that the employees understand the policies of the company’s promotions and all of it so that it reduces negativity and tension among the co- workers.
Research Questions
1. How conflict management affect teamwork?
2. What are the factors that cause conflict management in teamwork?
3. What are the recommendations to manage the conflict in teamwork?
4. Do conflicts arise more between males or females?
Literature Review
Conflict Management
A conflict is a situation when the goals and needs of two or more parties interfere with one another in a workplace; conflict may involve team members, projects, clients, and many other things. Usually, the conflicts arise among people between the organization’s needs versus personal needs, and in general, conflict is not a bad thing in some situation it’s a chance to make changes or improvement. Because of this, it’s important to understand the techniques that need to apply in such situations.
As we know conflict is something impossible to avoid because its human nature to disagree, and we need to have different opinions and thoughts to have diversities, but we need to approach it in the correct way. Therefore we have conflict management skills to communicate clearly, and patiently to keep relationships strong and professionally such as communication, emotional intelligence, empathy, creative problem solving, the ability to apologize, respecting, calmness, and many other things. (The balance careers.2019)
Teamwork
It’s the process of working and collaborating with a group of people in order to achieve the organization’s goals, they need to work well together in any conditions. This means they have to try to cooperate and using their individual skills regardless of any personal conflict between individuals. (Business dictionary)
Avoiding the conflict
This involves ignoring, walking away, and do nothing about the conflict as to not making it worse, this may be good for the individual but it won’t help to solve the problem because it will be left unaddressed, and among the team, the productivity will get low when a problem arises because of frustration and feeling ignored. (Smallbusiness, Chron.2019)
Competition
Competing to win conflicts in a team environment may lead to bullying, also among coworkers it may cause frustration because of the feeling that their point of view is not taking seriously. As these feelings grow co-workers begin to take a competitive approach toward the conflict, and then problems will arise. In this case, compromise is the only solution to avoid this to arise and let someone with this kind of thinking win. (Smallbusiness, Chron.2019)
Accommodating
Accommodating the other person is a description of a person who is nice and cooperative; they try to satisfy other person’s concerns at the cost of their own, this is for the sake to keep the relationship between them. Accommodating also has its negative sides as the person neglects its own concerns and from this, anger may arise afterward, and the person loses motivation to try harder Sometimes. Therefore, this strategy is a good way to manage conflict but not in all situations only in some of them for example if the other person has a better alternative than yours to solve a problem or achieving a goal. (Andy Eklund 2010)
Compromise
Compromising is an attempt to find a solution that satisfies both parties, which is usually leaving people unsatisfied or satisfied in a certain way. This strategy can be used when it’s very important to find a solution for the problem than the solution being great, or it’s something that needs a quick approach when you have a deadline, or when you need a temporary solution. (Hub spot 2019)
Collaborating
This is to satisfy both sides as they call it a win/win agreement as both sides come out of it completely satisfied with the solution they reached because in this style you won’t try to find a middle solution, your aim is to reach the solution that satisfies everyone. This is appropriate when there is an important relationship between both sides, and there are multiple overviews on the subject. (Mediate 2007)
After all this we come across these objectives for our research:
- To identify the factors that cause conflicts in teamwork.
- To assess the impact of conflicts in teamwork.
- To purpose, recommendations to manage conflicts in teamwork.
Also, one hypothesis will be formulated and interpreted for this research which is:
H1: conflicts arise more between females in team works.
Research Method
We will explain the relationship between conflict management and teamwork by defining the conflict management which contains (avoiding the conflict, competition, accommodating, compromise, and collaborating) as independent variable and teamwork as a dependent variable to know how it affects the functioning of the teamwork and the causes that affect the teamwork.
In this research, we intend to find how conflict management affects the teamwork, and what are the causes and the recommendations to manage the conflicts.
For the research method we will conduct a survey questionnaire self-administered, the questions will seek to test our hypothesis which is (conflicts arise more between females in team works), also the factors that cause the conflict. It will be posted on the internet and the respondents will reply them and post it back through emails, also it will be distributed to managers and employees that work in organizations which we will collect later.
We will have rating questions about their opinions and behaviors about certain cases as we will have five responses categories of strongly agree to strongly disagree; we will take a representative sample of 200 people, also we will use a pie chart to show the percentage for males and females. Statistical measure which is quantitative data we will use the SPSS program to code the questions, also we will use the central tendency to find the average value and to assess the relationship between the two variables we will use correlation and regression. For the time horizon, it’s a cross-sectional study as we want it to finish at a specific time.
Data Collection
To find the factors, impact, and recommendations we will collect data from both primary and secondary data, the survey questionnaire is primary data as we collect them from the organization by taking 200 samples, and the other information that we collect from internet, articles, and organization report will be secondary data.
Timescale
July 2020: draft literature review
August 2020: review research methods literature and agree on research strategy
September- October 2020: compile, pilot and revise the questionnaire
October 2020: administer the questionnaire
November 2020- December 2020: the final collection of questionnaire and analysis of data
January-March2021: completion of the first draft of the project report
March- April 2021: final writing of project report
Resources
I have access to computer hardware and software. And managed to have access to two organizations.
References
- Alison Doyle. (June 17, 2019). Conflict Management Definition, Skills, List, Examples. The balance Careers. https://www.thebalancecareers.com/conflict-management-skills-2059687
- Andy Eklund. (August 16, 2010). Managing Conflict: Accommodating.
- Business Dictionary. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/teamwork.html#:~:text=The%20process%20of%20working%20collaboratively,their%20best%20in%20any%20circumstance.
- Cathy Habas. (December 05, 2019). 5 Conflict Management Strategies. Small business.Chron. https://smallbusiness.chron.com/5-conflict-management-strategies-16131.html
- Dale Eilerman. (January 2007). Win/Win Solutions- The Role of Collaboration in Resolving Problems. Mediate. https://www.mediate.com/articles/eilermanD8.cfm
- Swetha Amaresan. (March 19, 2019). 5 Conflict Management Styles for Every Personality Type. Hubspot. https://blog.hubspot.com/service/conflict-management-styles
- Mark Saunders, Philip Lewis, Adrian Thornhill. (2007) Research Methods for Business Students.
