Conflict Management and Servant Leadership in Organizational Behavior

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Course Name
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11th-July-2018

Task 1
Identification or problems presented
In this case study the main problem has been lack of leadership and trust among the
team members. The top performing members of the team Liam, Sophia and Emma are
highly competitive with each other. However since the team is mostly on automated mode,
there is no major supervision provided to them. Recently when the conflict rose among
Sophia and Emma about approaching each other’s customer, the team leader should have
stepped forward and clarified the situation at that very moment. Since the team leader
thought that this would resolve in near time, it ended up exploding in the way it did. Lack of
leadership is also visible from the fact that Liam is facing some issue, however he is not
feeling confident enough to share the same with team leader or the management (Helms,
2015).
Probable Cause of the conflict in the team
In this team Liam, Sophia and Emma are consistently the best performers in the
team and they continuously compete against each other. Each of these sales people actually
goes on to target some customer in a different sector. There is no case of overlapping as
such in any one of the sector, hence there is no question of eating into the other’s territory.
However the problem exists in the allocation of sectors itself. Not all sectors are as lucrative
as other and hence some team members can feel at times that there is a case of unfair
advantage to the other (Dinh, 2014). This is the prime reason behind the problems in the
team. This conclusion can also be supported by the fact that there has been news and
acquisition that Sophia and Emma has been approaching each other territory and hence

giving rise to conflict among the team. With Liam it seems there is some problem faced by
him at home which is leading to his withdrawal from the team. In this case it can be said
that real cause of conflict is misunderstandings and may be to some extent personality
clashes.
How could one have avoided this conflict?
This conflict could have been avoided if there was open culture developed in the
team. If the team members could have been more open about their set of issues and could
have seen that there problems are heard and acted upon, the explosion of personalities on
the larger stage would have never happened. Active listening is one of the ways in which
this conflict could have been avoided. Even Liam would have come forward and explained
his situation to the team leaders if the open culture existed in the system. The sectors would
have been discussed between Sophia and Emma, in presence of team lead and things would
have settled down immediately. The conflict rose to such higher level because it was not
resolved when it was brewing up. This is the main way of avoiding such conflict.
How to deal with the present situation?
Conflict Management
The current situation is now a classic case of conflict management in the space of
organisational behaviour. The best practises of Human resource management suggests that
the best ways to resolve such problems is make the concerned parties talk to each other
under an open environment. The challenge for the organisation’s management is to create
an open forum, gain trust from both the parties (Sophia and Emma) and make them talk. In
this case it is important that both the sides are heard, and as a team leader a proper