Title: Resolving Conflict and Building Harmony and Cooperation in the Workplace

Today’s business environments are highly-diverse assuming that manger’s roles are not the set of corporate functions, but rather an ability to opt for the flexible approaches in particular situations while managing people and leading essential corporate processes.  The contemporary manager serves the role of mediator between people and organisations.

It is rather important to maintain individual identity in line with the applied principles of business ethics and culture (Hofstede, 2001). Organisations and people effectively interact on the basis of the common values they share. Therefore, effective managers should pay special attention to individual orientations, emotions and mischief.

While managing organisational processes, managerial functions are primarily focused on relevant tasks, processes and competences. Thereby a manager expresses personal power through individual professionalism in the course of:

- Decision-making,

- Motivating,

- Leading, and

- Tasking the subordinates (Dobbins and Stephen, 1986; Mintzberg, 1973).

Effective organising and managing human resources is therefore a key prerequisite of organization’s capacity to further develop its organisational structure, and manage relevant changes (Kislik, 2006).

The achievement of sound correlation between individual goals and actions and strategic aims of the organisation is the strategic organizational goal. Its achievement assumes that a manager should ensure full coincidence of individual concerns and staff performance with the corporate vision and strategic action plan of the organization.

Effective manager should seek adherent points where individual and shared corporate values do coincide. The realistic achievement of this goal necessitates through assessment of human resources guided and led by manager (Mintzberg, 1973).

 

 

Interpersonal conflicts are full of emotions and misbehaviour, forcing a manger to act as a mediator (McShane and Von Glinow, 2004). This challenge requires initial gathering of information about the conflict and the parties involved. The causes and effects of the conflict should then be assessed in an unbiased manner to answer individual requests of the conflicting sides.

The subsequent scenarios should be analyzed and proposed to resolve the conflict. Under the conditions of rather stressful business environment, human emotions should be limited to strict professional relations. However, emotions should be encouraged in informal situations which always make employees and management much closer.

Highly competitive organizations and diverse business environments altogether pose serious challenges before the today’s managers, thus managers should allocate much time and other relevant resources to maintain organizational learning within organization to effectively implement strategic management strategies (Argyris, 1999). Personal traits and features of a manager play a decisive role in his positioning as a charismatic leader capable to motivate and lead people and implement changes/improvements within organization.

It is noteworthy that daily organizational life is full of human emotions distinctive from pure business objectives. In addition to managing organizational development, effective managers also cope with a multitude of social-oriented issues while guiding, tasking, motivating, and leading people.

The application of diverse multi-cultural environment for the achievement of organizational goals necessitates managers to encourage better understanding of: (1) people’s personal traits, (2) backgrounds, (3) talents, and (4) skills as the viable resources that can potentially benefit organizational priorities (Hofstede, 2001).

This specific task should be attained through a series of comprehensive workshops for employees to assess their individual strengths and diversity. The accumulation of wide pool of talent within a single corporate environment can bring measurable advantages for the company, considering vast linguistic, cultural and social differences of individual employees (Bartlett and Ghoshal, 1989).

List of references

Argyris, C. 1999, On Organisational Learning. Oxford: Blackwell

Bartlett, C. and Ghoshal, S. 1989, Managing Across Borders: The Transnational Solution. London: Century Business

Dobbins, G., and Stephen J. 1986, The Effects of Group Cohesion and Leader Behaviour on Subordinate Satisfaction, Group & Organization Studies, 11:3 (Sep 1986), pp. 203-220.

Drucker, P. 1954, The Practice of Management. NY: Harper & Row

Evans, J., and William M. 1996, The Management and Control of Quality, 3rd Ed., West Publishing Company.

Goleman, D. 1998, Working with Emotional Intelligence. New York: Bantam Books.

Gosling, J. and Mintzberg, H. 2003, The Five Minds of a Manager. Harvard Business Review, Nov; 1-9

Herzberg, F. 1959, The Motivation to Work, New York, John Wiley and Sons

Hofstede, G. 2001, Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

Kislik, L. 2006, Coping with change, Multichannel Merchant. Stamford: Oct 2006.Vol.23, Iss. 10; pg. 42

McShane, S. L., & Von Glinow, M. 2004, Organizational behaviour: Emerging realities for the workplace. New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies.

Mintzberg, H. 1973, The Nature of Managerial Work. NY: Harper and Row
Watson, T. 1994, In Search of Management. London: Routeledge