Conflict Resolutions Essay

Conflict Resolutions Essay Conflict Resolutions Essay Conflict Resolution: Target What is Conflict Resolution? The best way to answer this question is to first look at what conflict is in order to resolve it. Conflict is when one party is considered to be in a serious disagreement or argument with another party. We as humans face conflicts all the time within our lives. It can be found at home with our families, at school with the facility, other students or parents, at work with our bosses and co-workers and can even be found when dealing with strangers. Most conflict can be small altercations and can be resolved on our own; however there are many times those small conflicts can get out of hand and become too big for us to handle on our own. This is where conflict resolutions comes in and hopefully help the two parties put aside their differences and be able to work the problem out. Within this paper I will focus on what is conflict, types of conflict in the workplace, stages of conflict and ways you and the company can resolving it. I will also look at the Target Corporation and see how their values help avoid conflict within the workplace. Let’s take a look at conflict and how it is affects us within the work place. No matter what company you work for, conflict is something that unfortunately is unavoidable. It can arise between you and your bosses, other co-workers or even third parties, such as, customers or outside vendors. Conflict can be both functional, which supports the goals of the group and improves its performance, or dysfunctional in which can obstruct group performance (Robbins negative employees will just constantly complain and look for flaws (www.lifehack.org). Another way that conflict can be created in the workplace is when there are disagreements over ideas, decisions or actions made by your leaders or other co-workers (www.betterhealth.vic.gov). The conflict process has five steps: potential opposition or incompatibility, cognition and personalization, intentions, behavior and outc omes. The first stage is the appearance of conditions, which are communication, structure and personal variables; this is the causes or sources that can create the conflict to arise. If the conditions in stage one negatively affects something the first party cares about, the conflict becomes an actualization. Stage two is made up of perceived conflict, which does not mean it is personalized, and felt conflict, which is when individuals become emotionally involved. Intentions is stage three, this is where many conflicts can escalate due to one party taking the intentions of the other party the wrong way. Using two dimensions - cooperativeness (when one party attempts to satisfy the other party’s concerns) and assertiveness (when one party attempts to satisfy his/her own concerns) we can identify the five conflict-handling intentions. These conflict-handling intentions are competing (assertive and uncooperative), collaborating (assertive and cooperative), avoiding (unassertive and uncooperative), accommodating (unassertive and cooperative) and compromising (both assertive and cooperative). Stage four is when conflict becomes visible and is known as the behavior stage. This stage includes statements, actions and reactions made by the conflicting parties; conflict management is needed the most at this point of the stages. Lastly is stage five, the outcome, and can either be a functional outcome that will allow the parties to continue to perform together or a dysfunctional outcome which