Introduction

In today world’s, most of the company are common to work in a teams. Conflict is defined as disagreement between individuals. Conflict can arise among members within a team or between one team and another. Conflict refers to antagonistic interaction in which one party attempts to block the intentions or goals of another. Competition, which is rivalry among individuals or teams, can have a healthy impact because it energizes people toward higher performance. Whenever people work together in teams, some conflict is inevitable. Bringing conflicts out into the open and effectively resolving them is one of the team leader’s most challenging jobs. Conflict in corporate teams is fine as long as team immediately works toward a solution. The role of conflict in work teams is determined by the manner in which it is managed. Conflict is a driving force of change that can result in improved decision-making processes and progressive team development. However, teams must learn to be confrontational without destroying the team process.

Teams are able to handle conflict and perform at a high level by following a framework of communication needed for managing conflict constructively and capable to mediate their own conflicts, improve both productivity and member relationships. Teams are typically made up of a diverse group of individuals, each member possessing different capabilities and skills. This element is what makes the use of teams so advantageous; however, diversity can also create conflict. Therefore, it is important for teams to understand the dynamics of conflict and to regulate its natural flow. Whether they are leader-driven teams or self-directed teams, the hope is that productivity, creativity, and results will be greater in a team environment. While this is a proven approach, any time you bring together people from differing backgrounds and experiences, it is inevitable that conflict will occur.

Conflict in organizations is not a problem. Well managed conflict contributes to creativity, strategic initiative, more effective systems and communication, stronger workplace relationships and greater commitment to the organization. Organizations shouldn't attempt to prevent conflict, but should instead focus energy on preventing unresolved or destructive conflict. Many people and organizations view conflict as a negative, or something to be avoided. Yet conflict, differences, or disagreements are a natural result of people working together. Also, without conflict, teams can become complacent and not perform at optimum levels. The challenge then becomes, how should the team be prepared for this stage of their existence, and how should the team leader facilitate through it?

Conflict may stem from a variety of causes, and understanding them is the first step in dealing with it effectively. There are a few common reasons will creating conflict between team members, (1)there perceived breach of faith and trust between individuals, (2)unresolved disagreement that has escalated to an emotional level, (3) miscommunication leading to unclear expectations, (4)personality clashes, (5)differences in acquired values, (6)underlying stress and tension, (7)ego problems, (8)combinations of the above.

Some of these can be seen as both cause and result of conflict. How do these things happen? We can see that some of these causes of conflict can be dealt with directly through management and leadership. Others challenge us in different ways. In the workplace, a simple disagreement between team members, if unresolved, may escalate into avoidance, inability to work together, verbal assaults, and resentment. In the worst cases, it may also lead to hostility and eventual separation from the organization. Therefore, it is important that the conflict be resolved as soon as possible.

CONTENT

Conflicting opinions and perspectives of each member occur in every team. Team is important to the company, because team need to accomplish all the task have been given by the top level. Conflict may influence the team outcome and output of the result. So manager need to handle the conflict with some strategy and skill. Besides that, there is some ability to help the manager to handle his team conflict based on the style. Developed specific styles for dealing with conflict, based on the desire to satisfy team member.

First is competing style and it reflect assertiveness to get one’s own way, and should be used quick, decisive action is vital on important issues or unpopular actions, such as during emergencies or urgent cost cutting. Second is avoiding style reflects neither assertiveness nor cooperative. It is appropriate when an issue is trivial, when there is no chance of winning, when a delay to gather more information is needed, or when a disruption would be costly. Third is compromising style – reflects a moderate amount of both sides are equally important, when opponents have equal power and both sides want to split the difference, or when people need to arrive at temporary or expedient solutions under time pressure. Fourth is accommodating style – reflect a high degree of assertiveness and cooperativeness, which works best when people realize that they are wrong, when an issue is more important to others than to oneself, when building social credits for use in later discussions, and when maintaining harmony is especially important. Fifth is collaborating style – reflects both a high degree of assertiveness and cooperativeness. Collaborating style enables both parties to win, although it may require substantial bargaining and negotiation. It’s important when both sets of concerns are too important to be compromised, when insights from different people need to be merged into an overall solution, and when the commitment of both sides is needed for a consensus.

Besides that, superordinate goal cannot be reached by a single party, requires the cooperation of conflicting team members for achievement. People must pull together. To the extent that employees can be focused on team or organization goals, the conflict will decrease because they see the big picture and realize that need to work together to achieve it. Company are using mediator, which is a third party to settle the conflict between the team and found out the solution so solve it. Both of the mediators are supervisor, higher-level manager, outside consultant or someone from the human resource department.

Another type of conflict management is negotiation, where by people engage in give-and-take and consider a variety of alternatives to reach a combined decision that is acceptable by both parties. There are two different perspectives of negotiation, 1) Integrative negotiation, and 2) Distributive negotiation. Integrative negotiation is based on a win-win assumption, which means in a situation that all parties want to come up with creative solution that can benefits both sides of the conflict. With this integrative negotiation, conflict in team is managed through cooperation and compromise, which giving or receiving trust and positive long-term relationships. Another approach is distributive negotiation. Distributive negotiation is based on a win-lose approach, which means in a situation that all parties will assume the equality is fixed and each party try to get as much of it as they can. With this win-lose approach, distribution negotiation is competitive and adversarial rather than collaborative, and this does not lead to positive long-term relationship. In other word, the parties will try to assume the “size of the pie” is fixed, either is two sites disagree or attack each other.

There are four key strategies to achieving a win-win solution through integrative negotiation. First is separate the people from problem. People stay focused on the problem and the source of conflict rather than attacking each other. Second is focus on interests, not current demands. Demand are what each person wants from the negotiation, whereas interests are why they want them. Demands create yes-or-no obstacles to effective negotiation. Interests present problem that can be solved creatively. Third generate many alternatives for mutual gain. Both parties come up with a variety of options for solving the problem and engage in give-and-take discussions about which alternatives can get each side what it wants. And the last one is insist that results be based on objective standards. Focusing on objective criteria and maintaining standards of fairness rather than using subjective judgments about the best solution.

Summary of company

Microsoft Corporation is a multinational computer technology corporation that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of software products for computing devices. And the best selling products are Microsoft Windows operating system and the Microsoft Office suite of productivity software. Microsoft need allot of IT architecture to write software program and solving program problem. Conflict are arises between the members. Microsoft have located many branches in the world, it need architect to explain new software to each branches. Architect is a person who builds relationship like a foreign ambassador with the ability to speak the language of the developer, project manager, and business lead. After building the relationship, architect define the architecture service offering that complement the developer’s service offerings, support the business lead’s strategic direction, and fall in line with the project manager’s project-management process. But in nowadays, architect always considered as “alien” by the developer, project manager, and business lead.

The general goal of architects was to get people to understand them. Here are the few problem facing by Microsoft architect’s, people from other country are not believe on what the architect, because they thought they already had the answers and what they did not need his contribution. The main reason for this is the conflict of interest from different aspects. Architects encounter conflicts with the business lead are because of the filtered requirements, as a result of not being a part of the requirements-gathering process. Besides that, an ambiguous business strategy will also caused the occurring of conflicts between architects and business lead. For the conflicts happened among architects and project managers, predefined architecture defined by consultants hired for the project without architect’s involvement as well as improper architecture selection by business lead without architect assessment are the main reasons why conflicts happened. As for developers, conflicts are caused by poorly communicated engagement model and poorly executable architecture framework with architects.

In order to prevent occurring of the potential conflicts, in first step, Microsoft team leader are gain entry into the circle of working team and trust by others is being an active and emphatic listener. For example, an active listener during meeting sections and held off from giving advices or recommendations until he was able to understand the full picture of the business requirement. This reduced the risk of developing conflict and enhanced the effective communication.

The next step is prevents potential conflict, architect offerings provides a clear delineation of services is to allow the developer and business lead to understand where they could be of the service to the project. And how architect can be of service to the project and the description of the architect’s service offering should be parallel with the project-management processes. Architect also provides a noticeable contribution to each phase of the project. After presented, the service offering of the architect clearly demonstrate the services and contribute to the success of the project.

Beside that, the architect makes an assessment of the document before obtaining the recommendation of the team members. Because the result of the assessment causes a sensitive topic, this approach helps them appear to be a team player and not a solo hero.
FINDING

From the cases we know that, the architects are using several ways to solve their conflict between each country members. At the first, architecture provide circle of working team and trust by others and become an active and emphatic listener. Inside this idea will help them to build up good relationship with the team member. In other ways, it sound like simple but is hard to do so. Most of the team members are coming out with little understanding of the business need and dishing out solution. The second solution is architect preventing potential conflict. Make a clearly defined of the services, both of the team members know what is going on. This can reduce the conflict of the company direction and goals.

Five styles of handle conflict was useful in helping manager, manager effectively manage the team members and handling the conflict in specific situation. Mediation is third party who helps to discuss the conflict with each party, reduce face to face conflict of employees, easy to manage. Inside the conflict management theory, integrative negotiation has the advantages in helping a company to solve conflict problem. It is based on win-win assumption, people stay focused on the problem and the source of conflict rather than attacking or attempting to discredit each other. Employees and subordinates more focused on the problem and will work together and build up relationship. Focus on the interest more than demand, consider which are more important and interests present problems that can be solve creatively. Negotiate of each party are naturally like to maximize its outcomes. Company and the employees get what they want and needed. That are no such prefect things in the world, people will always increase their need after they reached another level. There are so hard for company to get win-win assumption.

CONCLUSION

Conflict is the important issues will influence the organization performance. In the first step, we need to trust among the team members. By trust among each others, this will improved the cooperation among team members. Trust and cooperation are essential ingredients for a successful project team. Hence, will increase the productivity, speed, and improved quality of outputs. Once, if the workers didn’t trust each other, mean they can’t cooperate with each other. This will slow down the productivity of the company and those workers will appear as a solo hero but not team player. Besides that, to prevent conflict we need to be an active and empathetic listener. By using such method, we can reduce the risk of developing conflict and enhanced effective communication. Without communication barriers, we can hear firsthand what the business needs are and to engage the business in analysis dialogue, which will lead us to conceive of a more successful to ours work or project and also can save a lot of time, no need to spend time and energy discussing issues in depth and can’t deserve it.

Hence, potential conflict can be prevented. Once can communication well, the company will operate smoothly because no mistakes make by the workers hence the productivity of that company will increase and spontaneous the income for the particular company will also increase. Effective integrated conflict provide options for preventing, identifying, and resolving all types of problems including "non-hierarchical" disputes between employees or between managers; and is available to all persons in the workplace To put into a nut shell, manage conflict is importance in the organization. Once can manage the conflict well, then can manage to conquer the market in the shortest period.

Conflict cannot be avoided by company, need to be solved it in a shorter time period. Conflict management is an important issue to help company to maintain the relationship of staff inside the company.
RECOMMANDATION

As a recommendation, I would suggest Microsoft Corporation architect member learn the appropriate communication skills and the overall mediation process. If team members do not make the effort to learn the skills necessary for accepted communication, then the process is incapable of working effectively. These communication skills include learning to confront others, listening to other’s concerns, acknowledging opposing perspectives, responding appropriately, and committing to a plan of agreed action.

Second is regarding to minimize personality conflict amount team members. Microsoft Corporation should increase human relationship training and implementing team building activities. So the team members understand the unique nature of the teamwork process, as well as the realization that member differences are of value to the team as a whole. When there are few decision come out from discussion, alternative each solutions suggested by each party, after that both parties select the most reasonable and accepted solution. Branches architect will have their own opinion or decisions, architect who come from head office should list down both decision and choose out the reasonable.

Last suggestion is realize that team should not focus on conflict itself, is learn how to manage it. Managing conflict is not to reduce conflict, but handle it in a constructive manner. Teams must learn to be confrontational without destroying the team process. Based on the research indicates that high performing teams are capable of mediating their own conflicts while improving productivity and strengthening relationships.