managing
COLIN MCKENZIE
Are stress and fatigue potential hazards in the workplace? The select committee examining the Health and Safety in Employment Amendment Bill is considering the question. Depending on the outcome of the submission process, workplace stress could become an enforcement issue for employers under the HSE Act.
Developing
a CCO
Conflict Competent Organisation
0 rganisational stress, according to senior health policy analyst Frank Darby in an OSH policy paper last year, implies that an organisation is not functioning well. And a recent World Health Organisation report concludes that workplace stress is more related to the work environment than any individual psychological characteristics.
The work environment is fundamentally about how people relate, communicate, resolve disputes, how much control they have over their job, and how much support and commitment they get from management.
This article looks at the role of intraorganisational conflict in creating stress, and suggests an approach to developing more organisational competence to manage the conflict and prevent unnecessary stress.
34 March 2002 MANAGEMENT
Stress and conflict are intimately linked. "Conflict creates stress, which increases sensitivity and susceptibility to conflict, which in turn increases stress." High stress often leads to more destructive conflict. Stress prevention can, therefore, be important when it comes to resolving conflict. It becomes a vicious cycle that many organisations need to address more systematically.
How organisations view conflict
The following observations about conflict in the workplace are based on our experience training public sector organisations in conflict management.
Conflict has a bad name. People view conflict as something negative, an enemy to organisational performance. They see
it as competitive or as a struggle leading to a win-lose result. Clients seldom see conflict as cooperative where people share common goals. Organisations where conflicts are discussed cooperatively arrive at solutions that increase efficiency and reduce costs, according to Dean Tjosvold, author of Learning to Manage Conflict.
Conflict can be a positive activity within an organisation. Conflict can "promote new ideas, encourage better understanding, strengthen personal relationships, stimulate individual growth, and facilitate more effective solutions to problems", wrote Gregory Tillet in his book Resolving Conflict. Becoming more effective at managing conflict is fundamental to becoming a learning organisation.
Clients usually assume conflict is about opposing interests. In both internal and external negotiations people seldom have totally opposing interests or needs. They may have opposing positions, however this reveals little about why something is important. If people always work on the assumption of opposing interests this makes the resolution of conflict difficult. Morton Deutsch, in his book The Resolution of Conflict talks about conflict in terms of incompatible behaviours and strategies rather than incompatible needs. By changing assumptions to focus on common interests people can work on the relationship and the process that allows them to achieve joint goals.
The most common strategies for dealing with conflict are avoidance and accommodation. Denying the existence of conflict does not make it disappear; it just gives it more covert power. Always accommodating others' wishes often means that your own needs may not be well met. Avoidance and accommodation may be useful at times but as a general strategy they do not deal with the cause of the problem.
Different organisations produce different cultures of conflict. These cultures of conflict which are often not formalised nevertheless set the unspoken parameters
managing
for how people respond, say Kenneth Cloke and Joan Goldsmith in their book Resolving Conflicts at Work. They alter how we see our opponents and ourselves, what is acceptable and what is not.
Many people have attributed organisational conflict to difficult relationships, personalities or behaviours. These are typically just the symptoms of the problem. The conflict often comes back to organisational structure, policies, procedures and management. According to Chris Watkin, writing in the UK publication People Management last year, the key factor in working with organisational conflict is how to improve the organisational climate.
As conflict is a dynamic ingredient of any organisation it behoves management to be more explicit about how to address it. Conflict can lead to constructive change, it can sort out what is important and what we value and it can help us understand and work with difference. Conflict in an organisation is not the problem; the problem is unresolved conflict that festers, affecting productivity, working relationships, morale and attitudes.
How organisations need to view conflict
Organisational managers need to view the management of conflict as systematically as they view the management of financial systems, information systems, even human resource systems, according to Danny Ertel, writing on negotiations and conflict resolution in Harvard Business Review. The conflict management system has an effect on the successful operation of every other system. Managers need to change their mindset from managing conflict as a "oneoff" event or situation, to seeing it as an ongoing opportunity to learn and improve. Managers often fail to appreciate the longterm costs of not dealing with conflict.
In building organisational capability and capacity to manage conflict we usually focus on negotiation and mediation, mainly because they maximise the power managing
MANAGEMENT March 2002 35
and control of the parties to determine their own resolution. Each person negotiates every day, irrespective of his or her role in the organisation. In managing difficult internal issues, employees often get poor results because they fail to consider internal interactions in terms of negotiated processes.
If organisations want to embrace conflict as a process to enhance performance and the ability to manage change, then they must rethink the view that conflict management training is the only answer. Training by itself seldom leads to long-term change unless organisations have the mechanisms in place to support the outcomes. Below is a model for thinking more systematically about organisational conflict and trying to prevent the stress that arises from it.
A model for developing conflict competence New challenges in society such as increasing diversity, globalisation, information technology and new political and social agendas are resulting in organisations changing at an accelerating rate, becoming more fluid, dynamic and less hierarchical. These challenges will continue to put increasing pressure on organisations to develop new systems and competencies in managing conflict, says Robert J Robinson in
The Conflict Competent Organisation.
Developing a `conflict competent organisation' (CCO) has six key components. First is an understanding of the new social pressures and how they can change organisational operations. Organisations mirror the challenges that we face in wider society. If we understand the way society is changing, then we can begin to plan for how organisations will cope.
Second is whether we are open to new ways of thinking. New challenges often require new competencies and the need to test whether old methods and skills can provide the solutions we need. This involves challenging the underlying assumptions and values we have about managing conflict. Competitive values about the "other party" will lead to different results than collaborative values.
However we can't just change the values, we need to translate these values into new conflict management strategies such as how we define successful negotiation outcomes in an organisation. If the organisation focuses solely on financial measures then negotiators will focus on cost issues; it is as simple as that. The problem is that a very narrow definition of success overlooks opportunities for mutual gain and being creative.
From there we need new operating systems which can support ongoing learning and capacity building. For example, has your organisation got the following systems in place?
- Systems for ongoing learning;
- Systems for helping staff to know what methods of conflict management to apply;
- Mechanisms for feedback;
- Conflict prevention systems;
- Case conferences for exploring new ideas;
- Information systems that are linked to managing conflict;
- Support systems for difficult cases;
- Systems for coaching or mentoring;
- Training options that are linked to building long-term capability; and,
- Management commitment to training outcomes.
Next we need new skills and behav-
iours in terms of the ways we act in conflict. Organisations focus too much on the substance or content of the conflict and seldom give enough attention to the processes for managing conflict, and the relationship between the parties. New Zealand organisations often under-invest in relationship management and conflict prevention with the significant longer-term costs to performance.
Some organisations think that negotiation training by itself will solve the problem. However changing just one of the above components is not enough to ensure success in managing new challenges. Finally change is not just one way. The organisation needs feedback mechanisms to openly review how each component is contributing to managing conflict more constructively and if the desired outcomes are not being achieved, what we need to focus on.
Conclusion
Stress in the workplace is a contributing factor to people's health and to organisational performance. Stress has more to do with the work environment than individual psychological characteristics. Mismanaged or unresolved conflict is a contributing factor to organisational performance and people's sense of health and wellbeing.
To overcome this vicious cycle we need to think how an organisation can approach conflict more systematically rather than what we often see as a one-off or situational perspective. It requires more than just training. Good organisational diagnosis and training is a good start, however this alone will not provide the long-term solution.
The question is one of demand and control. How do we manage the demands on people while at the same time giving them more control over resolving their own issues, problems and disputes. If an organisation can begin to think about negotiation and conflict resolution not as an individual event but as an organisational system then we are well on the road to stress prevention. nl
Colin McKenzie is director of Conflict Management NZ and a senior associate of Conflict Management Group (Boston). Email: