Saturday, 28 April 2012

Blog Five - Power and Conflict at work


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.


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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