Conflict Management

This article discusses conflict management styles in businesses and their effectiveness in resolving disputes. Collaboration and compromise are considered the most effective styles. Collaboration allows conflicting parties to arrive at a resolution where nobody loses, while compromise involves giving up parts of goals to reach a resolution. Both styles focus on goals and relationships, but collaboration can be time-consuming.

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Conflict Management
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Conflict Management
In an ordinary definition, conflicts are defined as disagreements that arise within an
individual, between individuals, institutions, communities or nations. However, the definition of
conflict varies based on the disagreements arising in relationship or association with other
people, communities, organizations or nations. According to the research conducted by Trinn &
Wencker (2018) conflict can be defined as an incompatibility of intentions regarding a contested
object between at least two actors who endeavor to obtain the object for themselves by taking
measures that lie outside established procedures of regulation. Therefore, conflict management
involves taking appropriate actions to resolve contested issues with an objective of unifying two
conflicting partners (Lê, & Jarzabkowski, 2015). In the context of businesses, conflicts arise in
most of the time, and these business organizations use varying approaches to resolve disputes.
Businesses entities can conflict over several issues, which in all probability will require to be
solved. When businesses want to resolve their conflicts, they use conflict management styles
such as collaboration, accommodation, compromise, avoidance, and competition based on the
situation at hand. Preferably, collaboration and compromise are considered the most effective
and reliable conflict management styles businesses can employ to resolve contested issues.
In the business world, collaboration has been perceived as an efficient style to resolve
conflicts because it offers a win-win outcome for both parties. Gunkel, Schlaegel, & Taras
(2016) argue that collaborating/integrating style entails problem-solving, exchange and
assessment of differences to find solutions that both parties can accept. For instance, a business
can have a bad company policy that is unfavorable and frustrates its workers. This can be a
company policy that denies employees paid leave, holiday or medical cover. In this scenario,

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employees will not be committed to their duties and in some instances, they can boycott work. In
another situation, employees may want a pay hike which the employer refuses intentionally to
effect. This creates a room for an industrial action such as a go slow. In a case like this one, the
employees and company/employer shall have a conflict. Based on this scenario, the collaboration
will first bring the conflicting parties together; assess the concerns of each party before arriving
at a binding resolution. Ideally, collaboration allows the conflicting parties to arrive at a
resolution where nobody loses. In essence, businesses that are in constant conflicts with their
employees or customers due to poor company policy or dissatisfaction can use collaboration to
reach a resolution that each member can accept.
Collaboration is ideal for building customer loyalty in business. A resolution where both
parties feel that they benefit and do not have something to lose cultivates loyalty. If customers
feel that the business is meeting their needs and at the same time they are getting value for their
money, they can be loyal to the business. A business should examine any available opportunities
to collaborate with their customers to create mutually beneficial relationships. Watson, Beck,
Henderson, & Palmatier (2015) opine that achieving customer loyalty is a primary marketing
goal for any business that can help it build loyalty and reap significant rewards on ongoing
challenges. They add that loyalty includes attitudes and purchase behavior that a business starts
to gain over competitors. For customers to have positive attitudes and confidence in a business,
an organization will have to examine itself or scan its environment to identify weaknesses that
scare customers. Once a business scans itself and improves its operations to the expectation of
customers, it will gain customer loyalty. As a result, customers will patronize the business by
shopping their frequently. Consequently, a business will enjoy higher sales and increased profits
just for applying collaborating style in managing its conflicts.

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Collaboration improves relationships between businesses or customers. Successful
management of conflicts is always focused on improving relationships or trust. The aim of
collaborating style in conflict management is to give conflicting parties an opportunity to restore
or rebuild relationships that went sour following their differences. Young, Searle, Butler,
Simmons, Watt, & Jordan (2016) carried out a research to investigate the role trust in the
resolution of conversation conflicts play and found that collaboration rebuilds interactions
between parties and cooperation. In addition, this conflict management style recognizes the value
of each party. This is to imply that when businesses, perhaps with their customers conflict and
use collaboration to resolve their conflicts they can realize the importance of their cooperation.
Similarly, businesses can improve their relationships and trust, the moment they approach their
conflicts with collaboration. By doing so, each party recognizes that their mutual engagement is
important to each other. In addition, when customers see consistent efforts by a business to
address their concerns or respond to their issues, they will reciprocate by trusting the business
and believing that it has the capacity to meet their needs. On flipside, collaborating style
consumes time during conflict resolution. A lot of time is spent on perfecting the outcome.
According to Gunkel, Schlaegel, & Taras (2016) when using collaboration to resolve a conflict,
there are exchanges from each side. This is to imply that each party in a conflict will have to
raise their issues and suggest how they want the situation at hand to be handled. This is likely to
take consume a lot of time compared to other conflict management styles. After conflicting
parties make their suggestions, they will still have to spend some significant amount of time to
negotiate in order to agree to one unifying resolution. All of this will consume a lot of time.
However, conflicting parties should not take hardline stances for a collaborating style to be
effective and time-saving.

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On the other hand, compromising style builds relationships and also ensures conflicts are
resolved amicably. In most cases, some of the decision or problem in the organizations requires
complex and thought out solutions (Carmody-Bubb, Duncan, & Ree, 2015). Therefore, it
important to employ such a management style to ensure that such decisions are arrived at. For
instance, in the business that is faced with a complex changing environment that is characterized
with high risk for different decisions, there is need to employ the compromising conflict
management strategy to ensure all solutions are dealt with in the right way (Dijkstra, Barelds,
Ronner, & Nauta, 2017) As a result, compromising style calls for a better relationship among the
parties with more focus on the end result of a resolution other than personal interest. In
compromising style, the conflicts are resolved quickly. Factually, many people view things
differently and that is why they have a different approach to solving their problems. The
compromising style gives a variety of ways that the issues can be resolved and leaves every
problem solved differently and uniquely.
Despite compromise style helping businesses solve problems, it can be disadvantageous
to the parties. One major disadvantage is that no party will feel fully satisfied. In a compromise,
the conflicting parties understand what they gained and what they lost in a transaction
(Redmond, Jameson & Binder, 2016).When a party thinks of the loss they made in a transaction
they become dissatisfied. This is not healthy in the sense that it can deteriorate relationships or
deter cooperation. For two parties in business to cooperate, they need to be satisfied and embrace
each other. However, since the members feel that they lost something in one way and the other
party gained, they cannot strive to build effective work relationships.

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In comparison, both compromising and collaborating styles focus on goals and
relationships. The relationship of people in an organization is very crucial to the achievement of
the goals. People need to work together and also challenges different ideas in a friendly way to
ensure that the best results are achieved. In compromise management style, a party gives up parts
of their goals and persuades another to give part of theirs. So in short, a party must lose
something and also gain from another but for collaborating style, the whole idea starts as a
discussion where the parties work together to identify a problem and solve it in a win-win
situation (Lin, Huang, & Chen, 2016). Moreover, collaborating style does not consider arrived at
conclusion unless the negative feelings between the parties are resolved. Also, it may take more
time to eliminate the bad feeling and leave everyone contented with the final decision. On the
other hand, the compromising style takes less time to achieve the results or arrives at the strategy
within a short time since each person contributes and they do not focus on eliminating the
negative feelings. Additionally, compromising improves the curiosity and needs to explore
compared to collaborating style where which may agree to satisfy each party with less focus on
the goals (Lacity, & Willcocks, 2017). Besides, the two styles can be used in different cases, for
instance, a compromising management style is agreed-to-disagree kind of approach can be used
especially if people are in the same rank.
Furthermore, compromising style can be used if the conflict is complex and does not
have simple resolution. On the other side, it is appropriate to use collaborating style when peer
conflict is involved and the relationship maintenance is more important in an organization. This
is to imply that the managers can use a compromising style when trying to merge different
perspectives to solve a problem. For instance, in a scenario where the subordinates are looking
for solutions to perform their tasks, they may end up bringing different ideas together to resolve

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the dispute among them. In real world situation, the compromising style is still applicable in
most of the organizations as it is preferred during decision making. For instance, usually,
Amazon Inc. applies compromising style when requiring people to challenge each other in the
executive meetings by giving differing decisions (Tim Metz, 2017). Jeff Bezos trusts
compromising style since it equips the executives with diverse, opinions or information which
will require a compromise to make a decision. Bezos advocates that members stay curious and
open to challenge each other until they collectively arrive at the best strategy for Amazon Inc.
Summarily, it has come out clear that both collaborating and compromising styles are
important in the business environment. They can be used to build trust, cooperation and positive
relationships within the work environment or in businesses. However, despite its advantages
collaborating style seems to be difficult to achieve in a scenario when parties seem to disagree on
one thing. In some scenarios, one party can be adamant as if wanting the other party to relinquish
everything. In the case of such a situation, much time will have to be spent in order to allow
members to strike a middle ground. On the contrary, the compromising style creates a situation
where a person has to gain and lose in a transaction. This is to mean that in a transaction, a
person will walk into conflict resolution with an open mind expecting either outcomes of a
conflict resolution. Hence, since collaborating style is time-consuming and sometimes difficult to
achieve, I now think that compromising style can be the most effective conflict management
styles to me.

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