Effectively Resolve Conflict: Home

We investigated the factors that shape the working environment and workload, as these are reflected by the presence of conflicts among employees of a General Hospital in Greece. A cross-sectional study was conducted using a 20-part questionnaire, which was administered to 200 health care professionals. 24,5% of the participants referred that they want to quit their profession soon and nurses showed the majority and the doctors the lowest percentage (60%vs 7%). The willingness to change the working environment did not appear to depend on gender, marital status, work position and work schedule. The majority of the respondents reported that conflicts occur at their workplace, with the medical staff showing the greatest average number of conflicts in relation to both the other two professional groups. In particular, it was found that those who did not have a managerial position were 3.9 times more likely to choose to compromise in a conflict.

Have you noticed your organization becoming so focused on building a happy, engaged workforce that your leaders are becoming profoundly conflict-avoidant? I see examples of this all the time. One clue that your team is avoiding conflict is if the least bit of discomfort in a meeting causes someone to suggest that you “take it online.” This, of course, triggers the meeting-after-the-meeting phenomenon — another hallmark of a conflict-avoidant culture.

Working as part of a remote team, with colleagues spread out in di€erent locations, is increasingly common and surprisingly challenging. Absent non-verbal cues, it’s often difficult to gauge how your relationship is going. If something does start to derail your relationship, you don’t have the benefit of informal office interactions to build rapport and re-establish trust. Small irritants that aren’t addressed can fester into resentment and eventually impact your work. Don’t let concerns with your remote teammates grow bigger than they need to be. There are a few techniques you can use to deliver feedback that will get the relationship back on track.

Avoiding or delaying a difficult conversation can hurt your relationships and create other negative outcomes. It may not feel natural at first, especially if you dread discord, but you can learn to dive into these tough talks by reframing your thoughts.

Team conflict can add value or destroy it. Good conflict fosters respectful debate and yields mutually agreed-upon solutions that are often far superior to those first offered. Bad conflict occurs when team members simply can’t get past their differences, killing productivity and stifling innovation. Destructive conflict typically stems not from differences of opinion but from a perceived incompatibility between the way certain team members think and act. The conventional approach to working through such conflict is to respond to clashes as they arise. But this approach routinely fails because it allows frustrations to build for too long, making it difficult to reset negative impressions and restore trust.In their research on team dynamics and experience working with executive teams, Toegel and Barsoux have found a proactive approach to be much more effective. In this article, they introduce a methodology that focuses on how people look, act, speak, think, and feel. Team leaders facilitate five conversations—one focused on each category—before the team gets under way, to build a shared understanding of the process, rather than the content, of work and lay the foundation for effective collaboration.

There are few things at work as stressful as feeling that you can’t communicate with someone who has an impact on how well you do your job and on the quality of your experience at work. How many times have you thought carefully about something you want to communicate to your boss, a colleague, or subordinate, only to find yourself leaving the conversation feeling angry or frustrated by how it went?