Everyone is different and has their own background, experience, thoughts and characteristics, thus it is common to have conflicts and disagreements when we are in groups. Conflict is a social process which refers to disagreement within a group when the beliefs or actions of other members of the group are unacceptable to the other members. We may see conflicts as a challenge since it could let us think how to solve the problems and build up a better relationship. Unfortunately, if we could not tackle it probably, it could turn into a disaster.
In this semester, one of the courses was High Performance Collaboration and I had formed a team with Ashley and Tracy. I feel very grateful to have them as my teammates, most of the time we worked perfectly and harmoniously. However, we also faced some inter-group conflicts and I am going to illustrate it.
Our Team Background
Ashley, Tracy and I formed a team called TAB at the first week of this course. Ashley was a language student and she is working as an editor, there is no doubt that her language skills is the strongest among three of us. Tracy studied business in her undergraduate school and she works as a customer service professional, so her respond is the fastest. I also studied business as well and now working as a Human Resources Specialist, since I always have to do research to find evidence, my expertise would be from the proving part.
Responsibilities Conflicts
Below is the scenario of our first cooperation in group project 1:
Ashley: So we are going to write about what are helpful and not helpful of two group exercises......
Tracy: Shall we divide our work now? Everyone will be responsible for one part of helpful or not helpful factors. Let's see how we can divide our work further after done.
Beatrice: That sounds good. When will be the deadline then?
After the deadline, we all sat together and reviewed our parts. Tracy did her part the quickest and Ashley had the best language usage, however, I found out that they both did not use any theories to support their arguments / evidences. It was a surprised to me, as without theories, it is not a good academic paper. Hence I had the conversation to them during this meeting.
Beatrice: I found out you gals did not use any theories to support your view. Is it possible to modify it a bit?
Ashley: I am so busy at work and even do not have enough sleep, actually I just finished my part in mid-night. It would be very heavy for me to do any literature review.
Tracy: I am busy too and even need to work during weekends. My strength is on marketing side so I am not an expert in doing theories.
Beatrice: I see......okay, so maybe I will add some theories in both of your work.
As a result, our first group assignment did not work so smoothly. Of course Ashley and Tracy are very helpful and nice, however, as they are not good at making use of literature review, my workload became heavier since I also had to review their part.
Conflict Process
As discussed in our final project, the conflict process deals with five steps that help alleviate disagreement and problems within organizations or individuals. According to Jehn and Mannix (2001), our conflict could be defined as task conflict. It is related to disagreements in responsibilities and opinion about a particular task. It could be seen as cognitive conflict as well, because it is about task-oriented and arises from differences in perspective or judgment (Amason and Sapienza, 1997).
We all agreed that we had responsibilities conflicts when doing first group assignment and there was an urgency to solve this conflict.
Firstly we had to understand our team's characteristics. We are all very busy at work and basically leisure time is very valuable. It is understandable that we are not willing to give up our leisure time to discuss the projects. Thus, we must divide our responsibilities at the beginning and make use of mobile applications for any further comments or amendments.
Besides, we found out that Tracy always gets her job done at the very beginning as she needs to work during weekends.While Ashley is busy during weekdays and always work until mid-night, so she prefers to finish her part right before the deadline. For me, I am busy too, but relatively flexible when comparing to both of them.
Furthermore, learning is important, but we three also want to get a good grade in every courses. As a result, the best conflict-handling intentions would be Collaborating. High performance collaboration means working with others to finish a task and achieved shared goals. What we believe it that we three want to experience an excellent project and determine to cope with the best
agreed way to work together. With the support from each other, we have set up
a new working method and it is more acceptable by all of us.Solution
After discussion, we decide to make use of our group's characteristics and our own strengths to complete our projects later on.
As mentioned before, Tracy has the best efficiency so she would be responsible for the first draft of our projects. While I am strong at theoretical part, so I am responsible for the literature review. Ashley has the best language skills, so she would be the one who standardize our styles and beautify our language.
Of course, as mentioned in our final project, we decide to use mobile apps to communicate such that we would know when we could start our part. What's more, when we have different opinions, we could raise our immediately.
We did try this cooperation style and found out that it is the best solution. It is because what we responsible for were our strongest part, besides, we did not face any time conflict after using this new working method.
Conclusion
We kept the same working method during final project and we were all satisfied with our outcome. In this experience, not only we can solve a big problem, but our friendship also get strengthened as our trust level increases. We may still face other conflicts in the future, after all, conflicts may arise anytime and anywhere. However, after this semester, I learn that there is always a way out and collaboration should be the best method to solve our conflicts.
References
1. Amason, A. C., Sapienza, H. J. (1997). The Effects of Top Management Team Size and Interaction Norms on Cognitive and Affective Conflict. Journal of Management.
2. Jehn, K. A., Mannix, E. A. (2001). The Dynamic Nature of Conflict: A Longitudinal Study. Academy of Management Journal.
