Managing Conflicts Through Self-Awareness

Running head: MANAGING CONFLICTS THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS
MANAGING CONFLICTS THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS
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1MANAGING CONFLICTS THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS
The aim of this essay is to discuss the problems of conflict and communication of self in
a cross-cultural team environment. This essay will be discussing personal experience where the
conflicts started to create issues in achieving the team’s goals. This essay will also discuss
different types of personality identification and analysis tools to understand the reason of the
responses to the problems and how the issues has been mitigated with the help of these tools.
The experience of conflict appeared when I was operating in a small enterprise as a team
leader of a production team consisted of eleven employees. This was no doubt a small team to
manage but the problems in this particular team was quite critical to solve. In this particular team
the first issue was the communication problem as the ream was culturally diverse. Therefore, the
language difference created problem in proper understanding of the members’ ideas and
thoughts. This was one of the main reasons why the connectivity amongst the employees was not
present and this directly affected the team performance (Mardani, Jusoh and Zavadskas 2015).
Under this circumstance, I was introduced as the team leader of this team. My introduction as
team leaders made the team members unsatisfied because they thought their interests will never
be served as they were culturally different from me. In such a situation I was responsible to first
restore the integrity of the team then enhance the team performance by properly utilizing the
potential and skills of the team members. In this case, the personality tools like Johari window,
MBTI, TA and DISC helped me greatly.
MBTI model or Myers-Briggs personality test is an introspective self-report test that
indicates the different types of psychological preferences in the people’s understanding and
preference to see the world around them based on which they respond and behave. As each of the
person is unique but to the theorist every one of them have some aspect of their personality in
common which allocate them in a group (Wanget al. 2016). Thus, proper understanding of these

2MANAGING CONFLICTS THROUGH SELF-AWARENESS
personality types can help to gain interesting insights of the reasons of certain personality traits
and actions. In order to face this challenge within the team, the MBTI model helped me a lot. As
the leader of the team, I could recognize the types of my team members and improve my own
understanding as well as appreciating their personality differences. This has also helped me to
get along with the team and understand the related issues (Helmer et al. 2016). Myers-Briggs
personality test has four sets of psychological scales and each of these scales perfectly captures
the key points of the personality. The first scale is the extroversion and introversion, that deals
with the flow of energy. Through this dimension, I have understood that some of the team
members are introverts and they prefer self-reflection and self-discovery hence they do not
gather information from external environment. On the contrary, the extroverts communicate
openly with the people around them which help them to gain more resources.
Sensing and Intuition scale helps people to identify capabilities of their learning
information through the physical senses. The people with sensing nature like real-life and
practical experiences but the intuitive people rely on their instincts only. Thinking and Feeling
dimension captures the process how people make decisions. People with sensing personality can
use logical criteria whereas people with feeling personality depend on their values. The Judging
and Perception scales has helped me to identify the personalities of some of my team members
who are purposeful and prefer plans, organized and structured rules unlike others who are quite
laid back. By judging the team members’ personalities, I have identified their expectations and
style of decision making. This have helped me to strategize the actions to deal with them initially
(Goldenberg, Jung and Grantcharov 2017). Through this particular method, the behavioral
changes were seen in the team members and also of me. First, I gained insight about the methods
which I shall apply to manage my team members and communicate my thoughts to them to get a