Conflict management:
According to Ricky W. Griffin, “Conflict is disagreement among two or more individuals, groups or organizations.”
Conflict management: Whenever there are people working together conflict is common to see. Conflict is simply refers to all kinds of opposition or antagonistic interaction between or among individual or groups. It exists whenever one party perceives that another party has hampered or is about to hamper, the accomplishment of goals. The consequences of conflict may be anxiety, lower satisfaction and decreased performance.
Types of conflict:
1. Intra-personal conflict: It is a conflict within an individual. This type of conflict arises due to divergent goals and multiple rules which the individual expected to play. When the individual faces the problem of choosing among competing goals, this type of conflict arise. It may also occur due to role ambiguity.
2. Inter-personal conflict: This type of conflict occurs when two or more persons interact with one another. It is a conflict between and among individuals. The main causes of interpersonal conflict are personality difference, perceptions, clash of values and interest, power, status differences, scarcity of resources etc.
3. Inter-group conflict: Conflict between two or more groups of an organization is called inter-group conflict. Conflict between line and staff, between management and union etc are examples of inter-group conflict. The major cause of inter-group conflict are competition for scarce resources, joint decision making, introduction to change etc.
4. Inter-organizational conflict: Sometimes conflict may arise between organization as well. It is called inter-organizational conflict. The rise of competition among organizations may lead to inter-organizational conflict
Managing conflicts in organizations.
A. Stimulating conflict: All the conflict are not always harmful. In order to have positive effect, the optimum level of conflict must be stimulated. The following methods are used to stimulate conflict.
1. Reorganizing: Changing the structure of an organization may work as a way of creating conflict. Breaking up old work groups and departments and reorganizing them so that, they may have new entrants or responsibilities such action will create uncertainties and the call for readjustments.
2. Communications: Another way to stimulate conflict is by manipulating message. Ambiguous or threatening massage can bee communicated to simulate new ideas
3. Encouraging Competition: Organizations can also use bonus, incentive pay and awards for excellent performance will stimulate conflict. This is because one group tries to overcome the other group in order to compete each other.
4. Bringing in Outsiders: Management may sometimes creates conflict by bringing in people whose values, attitude and styles differ significantly from the prevailing norms, divergent opinions, innovative ideas and originality can be developed.
5. Resolving conflict: Conflict even work when it is at optimum level. But conflict has to be resolved when it goes beyond the optimum level. Some managers believe eliminating conflict. It is called, resolving conflict.
The techniques of resolving conflict as follows:
a. Problem solving: It involves bringing together the conflicting parties to share their problems. Discussion over who is right or wrong is not allowed but only discussion with regard to identification of problems and possible solution is permitted. Misunderstanding among the conflicting members may be resolved by this way.
b. Smoothing: Another technique of resolving is smoothing i.e. minimizing the conflict and telling everyone the things will get better by highlighting the similarities through peaceful co-existence and eliminating their misunderstanding. This is done because the conflict may worsen the situation as people continue to brood over it.
c. Compromising: Compromising is coming to a port of agreement between two extremes. It is the process of bargaining where the parties negotiate on the basis of give and take principle. Each party involved in conflict gives something of value.
d. Avoidance: Conflict can also be temporarily resolved by avoiding the conflict. It is something disregarding or a decision to sidestep the conflict of postponing the conflict till later. If the conflicts are minor and attention is required for the issues hen this method is suitable to adopt.
Participative Management
Participative management is a process in which subordinates are involved in decision making function along with their immediate superiors. In this system, employees are empowered greater control of the workplace. Participative management has been taken as an important tool or employees motivation.
The forms of participative management are as follows:
a. Quality Control (QC): The concept of quality circle was first started in Japan in the early 1960s to improve quality of products. Quality coracles consists of work team composed of 8-10 employees from the same work area who meet regularly to define, analyze and solve quality and work related problems in their specific area of operation. Membership is strictly voluntary and meetings are usually held once a week usually for an hour before or after the job is over.
b. Quality of work-life (QWL): Another important form of participative management is “quality of work life?”. Quality of work life is concerned with the working relationship between employees and total working environment. More specifically QWL can be defined as an attempt to develop a formal program to integrate employees need and well being with the intention to improve productivity, workers empowerment and level of satisfaction. The means QWL are share ownership, flexible working schedule, autonomy recognition, belonging, financial and non-financial incentives.
c. Self-managed work team: Self managed work team is also known as self-directed autonomous work groups consisting 5 to 15 members. It is a formal group of employee that operates without a manager and is responsible for a complete work process. The team member can independently plan schedule works, assign tasks to members, collective control over the works, making operation decisions and taking action on problems.
d. Management by objective(MB0): Management by objective is the philosophy of management in which there is participation by superiors and subordinates in the different management function like planning, decision making etc. The whole management process revolves around the objectives set by the supervisor and subordinates
e. Co-ownership: It is that form of participative management in which company makes employees shareholders by allowing them shares. They are employees as well as owner of the company. Thus, their participation is also guaranteed in favor of the employees participation share capital.
Features of participative management:
a. Ethical dimensions: Participative management has ethical dimensions and based on moral principle and values. In this form of management, everyone is treated equally when it comes to organizational decision making. It is based on employee empowerment, responsibility sharing and delegation of authority.
b. Proper channel of communication: Participative form of management that decides what employees need to do but it also encourages employees to participate in decision making and give ideas and suggestion make organizational process better and more efficient. They are allowed to share their problems, views, ideas and feedback with their managers.
c. Empowers employee: Participative style of management gives employees a chance to participate in management process. They are encouraged to come up with their views. Gone are the days when employees were bossed around by their managers. Now they are to be treated like co-workers. This provide a higher status to employees as they also have a say iI decIsion making.
d. Recognition of human dignity: In this form of management, all employees are treated equally irrespective of their designations when it comes to giving ideas and suggestions for organizational decision making process. Employee are no more the servants of managers but are the most important assets of an organization.
e. Psychological satisfaction to employees: Most of our lives are spent at workplace. It is important for everyone to have psychological satisfaction as far as our employment is concerned. Commitment from the organization, respecting the dignity of individuals and co-determining the company policies are some of the features of participative Management that provide psychological satisfaction to employees.
Benefit of participative management
a. Sense of ownerships: Participative management is a tool to make all the employees involved in the decision making process. It creates sense of ownership among the employees toward the organization. The employees feel that they are pre vital members of organization.
b. Motivates employees of productivity: Whenever the employees feel the sense of ownership then they are satisfied with the organization. They concentrate more attentively towards the organization. As a result of their motivation, productivity also gets increased.
c. Better creativity and innovation: In participative, management employees are also provided an opportunity to express their opinions and ideas. In this process they can also enhance their creativity innovation for the development of organization.
d. Better decision-making: In participative management technique, a decision is taken after consulting all the concerned members. Various alternative can be selected among them. This results to better decision making.
e. Implementation: Participative management also considers the people every stage of planning and goals setting process. As the employee are participated in the planning and goal setting phases. They are also forced to implement those activities. They are morally bound for the implementation phase.
f. Commitment: Participative management ensures the employees are also one of the important assets in organization. The employees begin to feel themselves as a part of organization. As a result, commitments of the employees towards the organization also become stronger.
Knowledge Management
The concept of knowledge management is relatively a modern concept and has been highly considerable to day where modernization and globalization is taking huge space. It has been an established discipline since 1990’s with a body of university courses and both professionals and academic journals dedicated to it.
Knowledge management is the process of getting right information to the right people at the right time, helping people create knowledge and shaking and acting on information. It helps the management to take right decisions according to the dynamic environment.
Features of knowledge management:
a. People oriented: It is directly linked to what people know, and how they can support business and organizational objectives. It draws on human competence, intuition, ideas and motivation.
b. Goal directed: It is inextricably tied to the strategic objectives of an organization. It uses only the information that is most meaningful, practical and purposeful.
c. Ever changing: There is no such thing as immutable law in management. Knowledge is compactly tested updated, revised and sometimes even “obsolete” when it is no longer practicable. It is a fluid, ongoing process.
d. Value-added: It draws upon pooled expertise, relationship and alliances. Organizations can further the two way exchanges of ideas by bringing in experts from the field to advice or educated managers on recent trends and development. Forums, council and boards cam be inclement is creating common group and organizational cohesiveness.
e. Visionary: The vision is expressed in strategic business terms rather than technical terms and in a manager, that generates enthusiasm buy in, and motivate managers to work together toward teaching common goals.
f. Complementary: It can be integrated with other organizational learning initiatives such as total quality management (TQM). It is important for knowledge managers to show interim success along with progress made on more protracted efforts such a multiyear systems developments infrastructure, or enterprise architecture projects.
Importance of knowledge management:
a. Competitive advantage: Knowledge can be an organization’s most competitive advantage. Wealth results when an organization uses its knowledge to create customer value by advertising business problems. A firm’s competitive advantages depends largely on knowledge rather than anything else.
b. Technology: Because of tremendous advances in technology, enormous amount of information can disseminated to people, regardless of their geographical location or time zone. The speed of transmission and frequency in which this transmission is received require an adaptable skilled and educated workforce from a knowledge management perspective. The complexities associated with these technological changes will think differently about the manner in which people learn inside or outside of the classroom.
c. Organizational change: Due to organizational changes, restructing, merger and acquisition, companies have lost some of their valued history and cultural norms. An organization’s ability to create, acquire, process, maintain and retain old and new knowledge is possible through knowledge management.
d. Enhanced decision making: Knowledge management also helps in enhancing decision making. It not only helps to learn but also helps in applying the acquired knowledge or the future activities.
e. Workforce demographics: Knowledge management helps in maintaining workforce demographics. It helps in knowledge sharing and transferring among various groups of workforce in an organization.
Process of knowledge management
1. Data capture: Raw data must be collected somehow before it can be turned into knowledge, or wisdom.
2. Data storage: There has to be a place to keep the collected information. Data storage for most business and even individual today is digital, but even a filing cabinet is a data storage solution.
3. Data organization: Once the data is collected it has to be organized into some kind of useful structure. For instance, a piece of paper that contains raw data likes sales figures, numbers, number of employees, price of products, employee attendance numbers and last quarter profits is full of raw data but its a collection if that’s not organized and can’t be easily used.
4. Data analysis: The often melds in the organization step, as the act of organizing data often requires analysis. Once the data is analyzed, then it is more likely to be knowledge than just raw information because the way the information works together and things like cause and effect become more obvious. Patterns become obvious and these can be used to illustrate general concepts. This turns the information into useful knowledge.
5. Knowledge sharing: At this point, the raw data has become useful knowledge or wisdom. While this is an improvement over raw, unorganized data, it’s necessary to determine the best way to share this wisdom with employees to make it truly useful on a daily basis, and to use it to reach organizational goals.
Important Questions
- Discuss on participative management.
- What is conflict management? Define intra and inter personal conflict.
- Explain the different techniques to handle the conflicts.
- Explain any two forms of participative management. What are its features?
- Explain the importance of knowledge management.
- What are the benefits of participative management. Discuss.
