My experience in the insurance, education and the financial services industry and applying the global financial crisis and credit crunch that we are slowly seeing positive returns, many companies cannot overcome their own problems so that leads to lower productivity, resource availability and reductions in the outputs within the business. Due to this situation, in order to survive in the organizations, it's essential for leaders and managers to have self- improvement in various fields and strengthen their abilities such as the ability of controlling and using power, politics and conflict resolution to manage and settle conflicts in their working environment. In pursuit of achieving goals, people need to deal with the interpersonal and intergroup conflict or problems caused by different backgrounds, cultures, education and differences in core competencies; in a sense so that they can obtain more power and influences over decision-making opportunities. I experience a landscape that seeks various forms of each element mentioned above. It is necessary to realize how conflict and politics influence our life working in an organization. Additionally, having a clear understanding of the relationships between power, conflict and politics within an organization can contribute to comprehend what roles they are satisfying in the workplace.
This brief paper gives an account of power, conflict and politics in various forms of my experience in organizational activity and the impact on performance. Foremost, the first part will demonstrate the definition of conflict and give a detailed description on the sources of conflict I perceive in some cases. It will then go on to illustrate power and politics in the following parts. Finally, it will assess some of the effects of power and politics on life within organization.
Conflict is not avoidable and can be managed and reduced by exercising power and political strategies. As mentioned in our readings this week conflict is not necessarily a bad thing, for it can force members of a group to recognize the deep feelings of one individual, or of a minority and make efforts to resolve the issue which appears to be divisive. I agree and have experienced first hand that conflict is a natural and inevitable outcome of the close interaction of people who clearly have diverse opinions and values, different objectives, and have differences in access of information.
When I look at conflict it is common that individuals and groups often have diverse aims and interests that they desire to attain. Conflict shows up throughout the interaction among these varying interests. I would agree it is harmful to have too much conflict. However, conflict can have positive effects on the organization itself by means of questioning the intrinsic and original ideas and thinking models, encouraging new thoughts and approaches, and bringing out changes. This is a philosophy I carry as a leader and manager in my organizations, with a goal to spawn new ways of looking at things with new proposals that can generate positive measureable outcomes.
Accordingly, I see several sources of intergroup conflict - goal incompatibility differentiation, task interdependence and limited resources to reach our desired outcome. Obviously, different contexts, different sources of conflict can be developed and transform to different problems. Our organization exhibits several forms of power in formal or legitimate power based on position. In some cases the influence of personal power plays a remarkable role in influencing outcomes in these unique characteristics; highlighting expert and referent power. Because role ambiguity exists in some cases there is a significant level of trust issues and the ability to form relationships quickly. Impression Management is clearly in full gear and those engaged in the win-lose context increase the anxiety level and stress around the organization. The politics play a remarkable role within the underlayment and foundation of the culture and subculture.
Within the divisions of the departments, the diversities of subculture, which can be referred to values, attitudes and standards of behavior can result in conflict and do so quite often. In addition, each department or group has its own working patterns, approaches to resolve problems, goals and perspectives. Interestingly enough, the higher power the leaders have, the more opportunities they strive for scarce resources. In such consequences, conflict conceal in the pressure to compete for those rare resources; such as staffing needs within a business analysts role to support operations.
Defining power in a number of ways in spite of levels of individuals, groups or organizations, power can refer to be wielded between people with interrelationships. We can leverage power in an organization, which can help people to carry out the results they want via affecting others.
Power has a lot of different sources. For many of us including myself derived power within authority is to help members to have success in acquiring the results they want; alternatively, it is special because it has a connection with hierarchy, which represents the social structure within my organization.
As a leader and manager for making the processes more efficient, I usually promote many different means to create the opportunity for cooperation and collaboration to decline negative conflict; a few strategies to enhance power: enter areas of high uncertainty, create dependencies, provide scarce resources and satisfy strategic contingencies when appropriate.
Similar to power mentioned above, politics is imponderable and hard to estimate. I think we would agree politics is the use of power to influence decisions in order to achieve those outcomes. That is to say, in organizations, people can achieve what they want or their desired results by utilizing their power to affect the processes of decision-making.
Politics is not necessarily a negative force and in our organization I recognized it as a potential positive. As conflict and uncertainty are inherent and unavoidable, politics plays a role as the approach that offers opportunities for people who participate in and come to agreements and make decisions. I could say many of times a lot of decisions are made
via political process instead of rational decision process.
The role conflict, conflict management, power and politics play in organizations and how they affect people's activities within organizations impact performance; as well as the operating culture many of us live in that derive productive outcomes. In handling interpersonal or intergroup conflicts, managers need to classify the sources of conflict and adopt the right ways to resolve them or try to turn them into positive ways through proactive training. Alternatively, managers should develop the abilities to make good use of the positive effects of power and politics in working the environment in order to raise the efficiency to achieve the desired outcomes. Our readings this week can reinforce how we should handle and respond to these social organizational conditions.