Conflict Between Abdul And Shirley

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Conflict Between Abdul And Shirley

Firstly, Abdul and Shirley are conflicting on the issue of leadership. The project manager had identified Abdul as a person who could work on the project effectively. However, Shirley also interviews Abdul and is very much opposed to the decision of the manager since she thinks that Abdul is not worthy to be in the project. After the manager leaves to start his own venture, Abdul and Shirley are supposed to work together on the project as leaders. This does not happen as Abdul takes full responsibility of being the leader and this brings conflicts. Dealing with the conflict between the two is possible. The first stage of conflict resolution would be listening to both sides and trying to understand why each of them is not comfortable with each other. Shirley complains that Abdul is taking everything upon himself and that it is very unfair. This is true as from what Abdul states he thinks that Shirley is too busy and she cannot give her full attention to the project.

Therefore, listening to both sides, it is easy to come to a solution. Firstly, there is a lack of communication between the two. This is because when Abdul wants to call for a meeting, he never informs Shirley and she is infuriated by this. Abdul also signs off letters and other documents with his name and does not care about Shirley who should be his co-manager. Therefore, conflict arises in this. The best way to deal with the conflict as O’Toole et al. (2019) states is first to establish the causative agent and the reason why the conflict continues to exist. The causative agent is lack of communication and maybe the feeling on the side of Shirley that Abdul is not good enough. Therefore, Shirley needs to appreciate that Abdul can work as well as she can. On the other side Abdul tries to prove to Shirley that he is good in his work by making sure that he runs everything. Abdul needs to know how to work as a team and stop trying to show off that he is the one in charge.

Therefor the possible ways to solve the conflict is by having both understand each other and work together which will make the work easier and even more productive since two leaders are better than one. The other option would be one of the two to step down and let the other one remains working as the manager. Even though this might seem off, it can be a good method through which the people understand each other and one person does most of the work with total focus. The other possible thing is that one of the leaders becomes a worker or the assistant of the other one such that there is only one leader and the workers. Even though this might be humiliating for a person like Shirley who hates it, if well accepted can work out well to solve the conflict. The last option would be getting completely new people to manage the project and the two who are complaining about leadership are placed at lower positions which are equal in power. This was the two will have nothing to compete against.

Reference

O’Toole, J., Bagshaw, D., Burton, B., Grünbaum, A., Lepp, M., Morrison, M., & Pillai, J. (2019). Conflict Management, Resolution and Transformation. In Researching Conflict, Drama and Learning (pp. 13-42). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5916-3_2