one: The causes in the book that were at the root of the conflict stemmed from both structural and personal. My current company has two sides of the business. One is customer facing sales and the other is back office administrative duties and sales. It is a small company, so we each maintain one side of the business and share an administrative assistant (common resource). There are definite personal factors concerning skills and abilities. We each specialize in our own side of the business and one of the partners is trained and able to fill in on either side of the business as needed, while the other partner is not fully confident in the operations of the other side, and therefore, not able to fill in. Also, due to the specialization of areas, we are fully interdependent on each other to complete our work. Another cause of conflict is due to our personalities. We are both abrasive people, and this can be difficult for each other to deal with and our assistant. Lately, my partner and I have had communication barriers. We do talk often throughout the day, however, we have had multiple issues with communication because we are not fully listening to one another, instead we are anticipating what the other is going to say based on our previous experience working together.

The form or forms of conflict that were displayed are intrapersonal conflict and interpersonal conflict. Interpersonal conflict most likely emerged due to our “individual differences, including personalities, attitudes, values and perceptions (Nelson & Quick, 2019, p. 227)”. Due to the inability for the other partner to fill in, it caused me to feel overwhelmed in my position at work and impeded on my work life balance. I am a mom, so it has been a real struggle trying to balance my family and home life, with my work life. This is also an example of interrole conflict.

Some natural defense mechanisms that seemed to be manifested by the stress is fatigue, headaches and backaches. When we have disagreements, I can feel myself tense and feel the overwhelming stress almost immediately.

References

Nelson, & Quick. (2019). ORGB6 Organizational Behavior. Boston: Cengage.

Two: Person-role conflicts are when an individual playing a particular role within an organization, is expected to perform behaviors that tend to clash or become of a conflict with personal values. An example of this that is given in the text is that of a sales person who must accomplish a sales goal. In order to make this accomplishment, the sales person may offer customers the most expensive or high end products knowing the product is out of the budget of the customer. In my past role as a sales representative, I have experienced person-role conflicts similar to the example listed above (Nelson & Quick, 2019). I second example of this from my past retail experience was getting customer to apply for the company’s credit card. As a sales associated, I knew this was crucial for those who are just beginning to start their credit or who was in the processes of purchasing their first home, but on the other hand for every card that I had a customer apply for would result in me receiving some type of reward or incentive.

A type of conflict that is often times observed is a functional conflict. A functional conflict is a disagreement between two or more individuals involving new ideas, growth, or learning (Nelson & Quick, 2019). In my current organization, there are not many millennials. With the array of new technology and programs that I believe will make the workplace more easy flowing and result of being less time consuming than some of the processes and methods that are currently placed, the introduction of new ideas is what I often suggested and see would take the organization on a new trail. Many of the coworkers are not willingly open to new ideas and adjustments in which causes for my ideas to be widely over ruled. The root of this particular conflict is personal factors i.e. skills and abilities and cultural differences (Nelson & Quick, 2019). Functional conflict is a form of intragroup conflict in which the conflict is inside of the organization. When dealing with an intragroup conflict it is the responsibility of management to self-analyze and diagnose the situation at hand. The demonstration of role analysis is primarily how these conflicts are resolved in my organization. With this solution management evaluates the roles of all parties and clarifies expectations accordingly. This has resulted in the workplace becoming more functional because I am primarily the key person that works on more projects that are digital and tech savy which I really enjoy and love doing while those who may not be willing to take the next step are placed with task that are of the current process and procedures.

Reference:
Nelson, D. L. & Quick, J. C. (2019). ORGB6: Organizational behavior (6th Edition). Boston, MA: Cengage. ISBN-13: 978-1-337-40781-6