Conflict: The Dysfunctional Nature Of Conflict

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Conflict is a process that gets initiated when one party believes or perceives that another party has affected or is likely to affect its well-being. Once a conflict comes into picture, the process of negotiation commences. A negotiation can be successful only when each party shows a willingness to consider the other party’s offers and an inclination to budge from its position so that the conflict gets resolved and a win-win situation is created. According to the Traditional view of conflict, conflict is perceived as something harmful and destructive and it needs to be avoided. This view highlights the dysfunctional nature of conflict that hinders the functioning of groups and teams and stalls the progress of the organization. But, more recent views on conflict, like Human Relations View or Interactionist View, describe conflict in a better light. These views support the notion of functional conflict that leads to diversity in a group and helps in generation of new ideas and thought processes. The Human Relations View of conflict states that conflict is a natural and inevitable outcome of any process where a group works together. Conflict cannot be entirely eliminated and it may turn out to be beneficial for the group or organization. The Interactionist view goes one step further and states that conflict is a positive force in any group and a minimum level of conflict must be nurtured in a group for a group to succeed. The idea behind this view is that if in a group, everyone tends to think on the same line, the group will soon become static and unresponsive and will suffer from dearth of new ideas. Innovation will be killed and that would lead to inferior performance of the group.…show more content…
Various sources of conflict can be summarized as: 1. Task Conflict (Minor source) – conflicts over content and goals of work 2. Relationship Conflict (Major source) – conflicts based on unmapped
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