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Structural Approaches to Conflict Management

Resolving conflict is an especially important skill. Our personal conflict resolution styles help us understand how we individually approach conflict resolution. But effective conflict management also involves recognizing and altering underlying structural sources of potential conflict.

In this activity, you'll learn more about these structural approaches to managing conflict. Specifically, you'll match a set of conflict situations with appropriate conflict resolution techniques. As you complete the exercise, think about whether these approaches would help resolve conflicts you are experiencing. Learning about these approaches is an important first step to being able to implement them in the future.

Structural approaches to resolving conflict include emphasizing superordinate goals, reducing differentiation, improving communication and understanding, clarifying rules and procedures, and reducing interdependence. Interdependence can be reduced by creating buffers, using integrators, and combining jobs.

Match each pair to the structural approach to managing conflict that is most appropriate.

1. Increased Resources
2. Emphasize Superordinate Goals
3. Clarify Rules and Procedures
4. Improve Communication and Understanding
5. Reduce Interdependence
6. Reduce Differentiation

• Management vs. Sales Staff (The store manager meets with sales staff regarding their tendency to compete with each other for customers. The manager emphasizes that the companys values embrace cooperation, and that competing is discouraging customers from coming into the store.)

• Mark vs. Linda (Mark and Linda come from different cultures and have different values, beliefs, and experiences. Youve thought about sending them both to the next corporate training event so theyll have something in common.) Open choices for matching

• Production Employees vs. Sales Employees (Production employees at the companys plant in Illinois are frustrated by ongoing pressure from sales employees across the country to get customized orders to clients faster. The sales employees do not realize the amount of retooling the production staff needs to do for custom work.)

• Account Representatives vs. Billing (Account representatives accept initial payments on new accounts. Unless the billing department is notified, the next invoice will be inaccurate. Youve considered requiring all payments be made directly to billing.)

• Sales Team vs. Marketing Team (The sales and marketing teams have frequent meetings, and often have conflicts when reserving the only meeting room in the office. Management is adding a second meeting room to that office.)

• Branch vs. Corporate Headquarters (Small claims are paid out of a fund the branch keeps locally. Getting corporate headquarters to reimburse these claims inexplicably takes one week sometimes, and six months other times, frustrating everyone.)

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