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Stress and Conflict

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Discussion 4: Stress and Conflict
Danica Riddick
Organizational Behavior
Dr. Shannon Jackson
Saint Leo University
January 26, 2015

Our textbook defines conflict as any type of situation that creates unsuited attitudes, goals, behaviors, and/or emotions lead to a disagreement between two or more parties (Nelson & Quick, 2013, p.472). When dealing with work there happens to be two different types of conflicts that seem to cause strife in my environment; jurisdictional ambiguities and goal differences between different departments. Before I explain how these types of conflicts cause troubles in my everyday work life let me first explain what it is that I do for my employer on a daily basis. Not sure if you all remember from my Introduction posting, but I work for the leading cable provider in my area. I have a job title as a Router Analyst or recently changed to Capacity Management Specialist for about three years now. I am tasked with the residential and business fields budgeting, taking care of manpower issues to create and load available quota for installs and service calls, schedule training and time off for technicians without causing variations of forecasted install and service call projections, ensuring daily efficient routing for in house and vendor technicians, vendor relations, and many other tasks. Jurisdictional ambiguities in my line of work could simply mean that our vendors routing team thinks that our team is responsible for creating individual efficient routes for their technicians. This creates an issue with my team as it has been communicated that we are only responsible for making sure they receive the total allotted quota that was agreed on for that particular date and not responsible for individual routing. During the early morning hours I receive calls from the different vendor companies’ leadership with questions on certain individual routes. This slows down my turn around time for reports that need to get out to our corporate offices. The misconception is just one example of how a jurisdictional ambiguity hinders my work day. Another type of conflict that I experience while working is goal differences. Goal differences cause issues with my job and performance on a daily basis. Our sales department is tasked with driving out installations all over the country. Recently, their goal numbers have doubled causing them to require more sales on a monthly basis. Their drive in sales has caused them to schedule and “force” more work into our quota based system. This action has caused extra work to trickle into the field causing our in house technicians to become what we call “overbooked”. This overbooking causes our technicians to incur overtime and rush the jobs that they are assigned. This rushing in most cases causes some type of negative experience with our customers and often a repeat call to the customers’ home. Our sales department and field technicians must understand that our reputation as being the most trusted cable provider requires a lot of hard work and dedication. According to Bromley (2002), “a more elicit understanding of reputation should improve a business’ practices”.
When choosing to analyze a particular type of conflict I decided to go with that of an intergroup conflict. During this scenario the cause of the conflict was that of goal differences. The goal differences we will take a look at is that of one within the same department just different job functionalities. The two positions we will look at is one of a dispatcher and one of capacity management. The conflict was that the dispatcher’s main goal and job evaluation is based on that of timely assistance to technicians and also that of technicians on time arrival to customers. The capacity management specialists’ goals where the dispatchers are concerned is to ensure the technicians are leaving their homes or shop with the maximum amount of points with an effective routes. As you can tell there is already an offset of goals where the conflict can either be handled in a constructive or destructive manner for success (Van, Nauta, Giebels, and Janssen, 1999). Throughout the day several dispatchers would be stressed and would have to end up working overtime after their initial shifts were over due to technicians still working to complete routes and meet customers. During the beginning and milled of the capacity management team would be stressed as well attempting to meet the point goals for technicians in all areas. Both sides were stressed and felt unappreciated as they essentially blamed each other for the added stress on the job. While the two teams were attempting to work through and figure out what could be done to alleviate the distress while at work and learn to function as a whole to provide both teams with a resolution that would benefit both teams. Many individuals on both teams started to display resistance and disdain for the other team creating negativism as their defense mechanism (Nelson & Quick, 2013, p.484). After a few months of high inconsistencies both teams were able to come up a few negotiated terms that actually assisted both teams in having daily success for themselves and the company. The conflict management styles we used in setting goals together were high in collaboration and compromise. The conflict at the end turned out to be a functional one, because at the end of the ordeal it improved work relations between the two groups. Also, the teams were able to work through their disagreements and felt as though they accomplished goals together rather than apart which is the basic definition of a functional conflict (Nelson & Quick, 2013, p. 472).

REFERENCES
Bromley, Dennis (2002, December 7). Examination of Issues That Complicate the Concept of Reputation in Business Studies International Studies of Management and Organization, 32, 3, 65-81.
Nelson D. L. & Quick, J. C. (2013). Organizational behavior: Science, the real world, and you. (8th ed.) Mason, OH: Southwestern Cenage Learning.
Van, D. , Nauta, A., Giebels, E., & Janssen, O. (1999, July 1). Constructive conflict at work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 20, 4, 475-491.

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