Conflict Management Styles of Workers

The term conflict refers to perceived incompatibilities resulting typically from some form of interference or opposition. Organizational conflict may result from scarce resources, jurisdictional ambiguities, personality clashes, power and status differences, goal differences, and communication breakdown. Conflict may be between individuals, groups or within a group. Conflict management, then, is the employment of strategies to correct these perceived differences in a positive manner. For many decades, managers had been taught to view conflict as a negative force. However, conflict may actually be either functional or dysfunctional. Whereas dysfunctional conflict is destructive and leads to decreased productivity, functional conflict may actually encourage greater work effort and help task performance. The present study was undertaken with an aim of understanding and comparing the conflict management styles being used by the staff at various levels in a famous textile manufacturing unit in Bathinda, Punjab (India). All the 25 workers and 20 executives working in this unit were studied for the conflict management styles being employed by them. The outcome of this process is discussed in this paper.