Overcoming Team Conflict

Team Members:

•Sidra Khan

•Laila Syed

•Hira Sher

•Shukaib Afridi

Importance of Teamwork

Contents

Working as a team

Tactics

Team development

Team process

Managing Conflict in Teams

Tension in Teams

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3 Four main aspects of team process

• Consists of more than one person

• Each with different responsibilities

• Seven common elements– Common purpose – Interdependence– Clear roles and contributions – Satisfaction from mutual working– Empowerment.

Team work

• Make teamwork less difficult

• Effective and productive team process

• Better understanding of team work

• Achieving formal task efficiently

• Recognizing potentials of the team work

Purpose of the Note…

• Groups evolve into teams

• Composed of unique individuals

• Relationship among team members

• Observing & diagnosing team process

• Team behavior

• How & when to intervene

Effective Team Process

Four main aspects of Team Process

Decision Participation Influence

Conflict

Decision making Process

• Problem Solving

• Traps to be avoided

• Supported by opinion leaders

• Technically better solutions

• Identify & explore the problem

• Generate possible solutions

• Refine and critique possible solution

• Implement the solution

Steps of Decision Making

Participation

• Little disparity is normal

• Large disparity shows an

ineffective process

• Uneven participation

• Active participators

• Gender Differences

• Linguistic styles

• Cultural learned signals

• Personality type

• Style preferences

Factors affecting Participation

• Members act as gate keepers

• Provide opportunity to all members

• Encouraging & Helping behavior

• Culture of acceptance

• Clarifying the point which is less considered

• Reinforcing a prior point

• Bring out silent people

Intervention

Influence

• Personality type

• Group process

• Too much influence

• Ideas of others rejected

• Higher influencing members

• Lower influencing members

Imbalance in influence

• Dominating members

• Pointing out the ideas

• Ignoring the dominating member`s ideas

• Broadening the discussion

Intervention

Conflict

• Individual differences

• Team`s collective identity

• Task conflict

‾ Constructive

‾ Destructive

Task Conflict

• Affective / emotional

• Extreme stress

• Strained emotions

• Hard feeling

• Undermine team

effectiveness

Destructive Conflict

• Task conflict

• Honest team discussions

• Creativity

• Different ideas

• Alternative solutions

Constructive Conflict

Minimizing Affective Conflict

“Who am I…?”

Templates

“Do I have a value…?”

3 “Do I have Influence…?”

• Group Interaction

• Grappelled with Questions2

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• Sense of fairness

• Empowering team members

• Examining appropriate behavior

• Reinforce desirable behavior

• Ground discussions

• Commonly held team goals

• Encourage task conflict

Intervention

Team Development

• Demanding performance• Team purpose

– Imposed from above

• Team goals– Established within the team

• Meaningful performance• Concrete performance goals

Setting Goals

• Options

• Achieving the goal

• Fair share of work

• Collective work product

• Social loafing

Establishing working approach

Team Culture

Setting clear rules

Developing normsBasic working structure

How teams should operate?

• Impossible to eliminate• No learning• No creativity

Why Conflict?

• Keep differences controlled

• Manage it once surfaced

How to React to Conflict?

Managing Conflict

• Depersonalize

• Treat as organizational

issue

• Similar to groupthink

Silencing

Reasons

• Supervisor’s pressure

• Unwelcomed advice

• Team integrity

• Time sensitive project

• Unanimity

Results

Broken Relationships Diminished creativity

Impaired learning Poor decision-making

• Replace silent spirals with virtuous spirals of speaking

• Take risk to express your opinion

– Openly

– Honestly

– Strategically

• Major role of Leaders

Strategies to avoid Silencing

• Achieving mutual understanding

• Bring hidden agendas to surface

• Walk a mile in other person’s shoes

– Create a free space for talking

• Don’t judge too quickly

Seeing other’s Perspectives

• Develop skills of active listening

• Make productive conversations

• Discuss key operational goals

• Clearly assigned roles and accountability

• Discuss interdependencies

Organizational Support

• Don’t triangulate conflict

• Don’t recruit supporter for your point of view

• Don’t criticize other

• Try not to personalize issues

Contd…

Tension in Teams

• When is it Destructive?

• When is it Constructive?

Constructive

• Stagnancy

• Good ideas wither and die

• Cause snowball effect

Destructive

Team Leader’s Role

How to turn conflict positive?

Facilitator

Set a few ground rules

Stick to the facts

Lead by Example

Expert’s Advices

Ways of Turning Conflict Positive

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Find a time and place for conflict

1. Set a Few Ground Rules

2. Stick to the Facts

Find a time and place for conflict

4. Lead by Example

5. Facilitator

• Inevitable

• Tactics to deal with interpersonal

conflict

• Recognizing personality types

Handling Conflict in Teams

Tactics

• Respond kindly

• Doing the same reinforces his behavior

• Respond in an unexpected way

Avoid “Tit for Tat” reactions

• Misbehavior signal deeper problems

• Manager should search it out and deal with it

• Gives you a chance to search out the team for other problems

Underlying Message

• Enforce solutions on teams

• Let the team workout its own problems

• Achieving goal

• Pointing towards solution

Use the team to heal the team

• Balance between:

– Short term benefit

– long term need

• Check how important for plan long term

• Wiser:

– Accept short term pain

– Build long term strength and trust

Lose the battle; win the war

• Every team has self loving people

• Give them what they need

• Offer him some compliments

• Then switch to other member

Satisfy the Showoff

• Always positive • Always anxious• Keep themselves in• Turn out to be doing nothing

• To deal with these people, praise them and bring others in

Calm the eager Beaver

• Interrupts every brainstorming session

• Take out flaws

• Disapprove all the options

• To deal with these folks, challenge them to come up with

something of their own

Silence the Heckler

• Don’t want anything to change

• Real concerns should be dealt

• If no reason; take action

• Give him another course of action

• Or send him on a project of his own

Move the Mule

• Can’t be silenced

• Continue path that has little to do

• To deal with such people

– acknowledge the underlying emotion

• Dealing with the deeper issues will remove the disruptive behavior in the

long run

Realign the right but irrelevant Ringer

Before it’s too late…!

THANK YOU!