Managing Conflict
The Impact of Interpersonal Conflict on Team Performance
Conflict can have damaging or productive effects on the performance of a team.
Learning Objectives: Analyze how conflict can both help and hurt a team's performance
Key Points
- Conflict is common within teams, especially during the storming phase of team development.
- Team conflict provides benefits, including resolving misunderstandings, improving processes, and changing behaviors.
- Team conflict can have negative consequences such as reduced group cohesion and lower productivity, and it can even threaten the team's existence.
Key Terms
- Interdependent: Mutually dependent; reliant on one another.
- Affective: Relating to, resulting from, or influenced by emotions.
Conflict often occurs in teamwork, especially during the brainstorming phase of team development. While at first, we may think that all conflict among team members is undesirable and harmful, resolving conflicts can benefit team performance. Whether a conflict is productive or not depends on how team members perceive it and how it affects progress toward the team's goals.
Benefits of Team Conflict
Substantive conflicts can affect performance for the better by removing barriers caused by different assumptions or misunderstandings about a team's tasks, strategy, or goals. Conflict can be constructive when it creates broader awareness about how team members are experiencing their work, leading to changes that improve members' productivity. Conflict can also lead to process improvements, such as when it reveals a deficiency in how the team communicates, which can then be corrected. Clashes of ideas can lead to more creative solutions or otherwise provide perspectives that persuade the team to take a different approach that is more likely to lead to success.
Addressing personal conflicts that arise among members can facilitate cooperation by helping individuals adapt their behavior to better suit others' needs. Although most people find conflict uncomfortable while experiencing it, they can recognize its value as the team progresses in its development.
Negative Consequences of Team Conflict
While conflict can lead to a solution to a problem, conflicts can also create problems. Discord caused by enmity among individuals can reduce team cohesion and the ability of team members to work together. Conflicts can create distractions that require time and effort to resolve, delaying task completion and putting the team's goals at risk.
Communication suffers when people withdraw their attention or participation, leading to poor coordination of interdependent tasks. Tension and heightened emotions can lower team members' satisfaction, increase frustration, and lead to bad judgments. This conflict can cause individuals to withdraw from the team, requiring the assignment of a new member or creating a resource scarcity that makes it more difficult for the team to fulfill its purpose. In extreme cases, conflict among members, if left unaddressed, can lead to the team's complete inability to function and to its disbandment.
Source: Boundless
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