Power and conflict at work
Conflict is when two individuals or two groups of people
have a disagreement on a subject which would involve a resolution. When
employees with differing social experiences, personalities, needs and points of
view interact with co-workers, disagreements may cause stress. (Bratton and Jeffrey, 2003). Conflict can
occur in organisations where individuals have differing ideas or opinions on
work set and conflict about the ways in which working practices are carried out
to achieve the goal set. Conflict normally involves opposing views on one or
more of the following including commodities, relationships, territory and
principles. (Anon., 2011)
Conflict within a group
I have been involved in conflict within a football team when
playing against an opposing and resulted in being unable to achieve our main
purpose and therefore losing the game. Conflict developed when players became
frustrated with each other and some of these frustrations were not resolved
effectively. The relations of players was unitarist as each player saw that
others followed the same aim as them, conflicts were seen to be peripheral and team
working was beneficial whilst conflicts were a disadvantage to the team goal.
Strategies used to deal with the peripheral conflicts within the team were for
players to express their views and frustrations via the captain therefore
enabling the players to find some common ground and to calm the situation down.
This is due to most unitarist views of conflict believing that conflict arises
from communication failure between the people concerned. Therefore players
could therefore speak openly about their issues and compromises could be made encouraging
conflict resolution. The captain would also clarify the specific goals of achievement
in which all players worked together to achieve to ensure players can reflect
on having the same common goal. Therefore a strategic approach of having the
captain of the team help to resolve conflicts within the team to improve
communication flows and using the same strategy each time was beneficial to
help guide players to solve conflicts and reduce conflicts from occurring in
the future.
French and Raven explains that there are five different
sources of power within a workplace which employees may have to gain power when
at work. The five different ‘sources of power’ include coercive power, reward
power, expert power, legitimate power and referent power.
Coercive power occurs when an employee is able to punish a
worker for not complying with the correct working practices of the company. For
example an employee choosing to arrive to start work 15 minutes later every day
than all other employees in the workforce. This would breach the contract of
time in which the employee should work and therefore a line manager of the
organisation would have coercive power over the employee to take action. Reward
power is the ability of a person to reward another however expects a reward in
return for this therefore enabling a person to compensate another for compliance.
An example of this is when a line manager of an organisation authorises an
employee time off work for holiday which may conflict with another employee
being off work at the same time however the employee therefore works overtime
for the line manager to enable the holiday time. Expert power occurs when an
employee’s knowledge overpowers another employee’s idea and therefore the power
of this knowledge results in the opinion of that employee to be taken into
account. An example of this is when an employee at a higher level in the
hierarchy has greater knowledge of the companies’ practices from working at the
organisation for a longer period of time and therefore is able to overpower the
employee in terms of known knowledge on the subject. Legitimate power explains
a leaders approach in that they have power of ordering employees to carry out
certain tasks and expect the employees to follow these demands. For example a
manager of an organisation would give out tasks to the line managers of each
department and would expect every employee to follow work set out by their line
managers and complete the work to a quality standard. Finally, referent power
explained by French and Raven explains that an employee may hold power in the
hierarchy of an organisation for having an identity or status which is
respected by other employees. Therefore respect is given to this employee due
to the positive opinions of the worker from the individual’s identity. An
example of this may be that most employees at lower levels of the hierarchy may
have respect for the chief executive officer of the company as this person
leads from the front and has extensive knowledge of the company’s operations. (Anon.,
2012)
Recent article on work-related stress
This article explains that more public sector works develop
work-related stress than private sector workers. ‘Public sector workers take an
average 9.1 days sick leave a year compared to 5.7 days in the private sector’
– research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) (Hicks, 2012).The
article explains that this absenteeism may have resulted from work related
stress where workers may have added workloads and the need to meet work related
targets within the health, social work and education organisations. When
linking this story back to conflict occurring in businesses, public sector
workers may also suffer work related stress due to the uncertainty of their job
security. This has resulted in public sector workers striking due to this issue
caused by government cut backs and therefore can create conflict within the
workplace. This can be linked to the statistic of almost 50% of unionised
public sector organisations being hit by strike action over the past 12 months.
Therefore in conclusion, work related stress can be caused by conflicts within
the organisation due to strikes and unionised organisations carrying out strike
action.
Article on work related stress - http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/2012/mar/15/support-stressed-public-sector-staff
Conclusion
Conflict between employees and employers has a negative
effect on the running of the business and can affect the environment workers
are in. This can affect the motivation of employees and it’s important for the
managerial sector of companies to ensure that conflict is kept to a minimum
otherwise it can damage the long term running of the business.
French and Raven’s sources of power are beneficial in
explaining where conflict can arise from as employees at different levels of
the hierarchy in a company can overpower other workers views. Therefore it is
also important to ensure that power of different employees is handled correctly
so that each employee is entitled to their own opinion. Different employee
relations can impact on conflicts although if employees learn to follow a
working strategy that coincides with other employees working ethics, conflict
will not occur often in most businesses.
References
Anon. (2011) Finding a definition of conflict
[online]. In-tuition. Available from:
http://www.practical-management-skills.com/definition-of-conflict.html
[Accessed: 19 April 2012].
Anon. (2012) French
and Raven's five forms of power [online]. Mind tools. Available from:
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_56.htm [Accessed: 19 April 2012].
Bratton, J. and
Jeffrey, G. (2003) Human resource management. 3rd ed. Bath: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Hicks, B. (2012) What
public managers can do to support stressed staff [online]. The Guardian.
Available from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/public-leaders-network/2012/mar/15/support-stressed-public-sector-staff
[Accessed: 19 April 2012].
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