Running head: STRATEGIES FOR RESOLVING TEAM CONFLICT
Strategies for Resolving Team Conflict
Strategies for Resolving Team Conflict
Dealing with conflict is always a challenging situation, which requires team members to be integrated into a single, organized unit (Bolger, 2003). Conflict among teams is bound to occur no matter how much one tries to avoid it. While resolving all conflicts is not possible, these conflicts can be dealt with using the correct methodology. To address team conflict there are five methods: Accommodate, Compromise, Enforce, Explore, and Postpone (Bolger, 2003).
Accommodation
Bases for using the accommodation strategy occurs when working together to accomplish goals are far more important than sorting out personal differences. This means that individuals or teams decide to go along with another's point of view or decision. This strategy can be chosen when there is a subject matter specialist present who has more expertise in a given discipline or when a team has greater ownership of the issue and the outcome or result is not as important (Sessa, 1996). The accommodation strategy reduces group disagreement and helps an individual appear reasonable by submitting to another person's point of view. In many, situations this approach provides good will for bargaining at a later date. However, caution should be exercised, because if this strategy is overutilized the team will assume that individual is weak. Conversely the team will consider that individual unreasonable if accommodation is overutilized.
Compromising
Compromising occurs when individuals or teams agree to yield t ...