Leadership: Solving Conflicts and Clashing Viewpoints in an Organisation

This article discusses two incidents of conflicts in an organisation and how they were solved using different leadership theories. The Directive theory was used to manage disagreements among employees and promote team spirit, while the Participative theory was used to minimise differences in thought processes and encourage decision-making by the team. The article also discusses the pros and cons of each theory.

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Incident-1
Solving conflicts is the main idea to manage the disagreements on the part of various
employees. A team consists of members that have different believe system. Even after
providing the training, it is not necessary that employee comply with all ethical rules. Due to
empowering power to a particular member led to leg pulling and jealously among other
members. This hampered the team spirit that enforce each other to work for a common goal.
Leader has applied Directive theory that give a clear direction and expectations to the
employees. Leader started giving importance to every specialised team member so that they
do not feel separated from the team (Collinson, 2014). By following the directive theory,
leader involved himself very much into the operation with its employees. It has provided
structure to various unstructured tasks. The leader focus on protecting each employee by
considering the safety issues. It has reduced the issues with de-motivated employees by
allocating a particular work in which they are specialised. Apart from these, leader has
undertaken training on unethical issues to make them understand the importance of team
spirit. On the same side, leader has undertaken activities to promote team spirit and work
together as a team. Leader promoted activities and games that ask for team building methods
such as a healthy discussion and suggestion session on improving the quality of goods by
establishing new technology. On the controversy, path-theory leadership can fail when the
leader has flaws. It is possible that the leader will not react as rational as he should be
(Raelin, 2017).
Incident-2
Clashing of viewpoints of two members of the organisation influenced people and this
led to forming of new groups inside the same team. Groups lead to non-alignment of different
business activities affecting the organisational objectives. The company suffered from lack of

Leadership: 2
participation of each member of the team. Here to solve this incident, the leader has used
participative theory (Llopis, 2014). This leadership theory is also known as democratic
leadership where employees are invited to take part in decision-making processes. This
leadership style is not very much common in business currently. To minimise the differences
in the thought processes of employees, the leader started sharing knowledge to effectively
manage decision-making process. The leader come up with best possible solution to the team.
Here, the leader encourages the people to share and delegate the ideas. While identifying the
contingencies for participative leadership as every leadership has pros and cons of its own.
Leader is forced to spent time and have social pressure to assure that group domination is
more important than a individualism. Group here refers to the whole team. Decision-making
in democratic leadership takes a lot of time. This lead to incurring of huge costs. Even after
long discussion on external business environment, there is a possibility that inefficient,
incompetent can happen, and the decision can lead to loss (Fairhurst, and Connaughton,
2014).

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References
Collinson, D., (2014). Dichotomies, dialectics and dilemmas: New directions for critical
leadership studies?. Leadership, 10(1), pp.36-55.
Fairhurst, G.T. and Connaughton, S.L., (2014). Leadership: A communicative perspective.
Leadership, 10(1), pp.7-35.
Llopis, G. (2014). 4 Ways Leaders Effectively Manage Employee Conflict. Retrieved from:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/glennllopis/2014/11/28/4-ways-leaders-effectively-manage-
employee-conflict/#11cac1c05e15
Raelin, J.A., (2017). Leadership-as-practice: Theory and application—An editor’s reflection.
Leadership, 13(2), pp.215-221.