CONFLICT AND STRESS MANAGEMENT

Meaning and Definition of conflict:-Conflict is an interpersonal process that arises from disagreements over the goals to be attained or the methods to be
used to accomplish them. It is a situation in which two or more parties feel themselves in opposition.

a) Conflict Management:

Conflict is a condition where there is opposition, disagreement between two or more people.
This may be due to lack of communication, differences over certain issues, and/or contradiction in ideas, beliefs, and thoughts.
Conflicts at the workplace can hamper the progress of your work and in turn stunts the growth of the organization.

Conflicts act as barriers to healthy organizational development.

Sometimes, however, how hard we try; we end up with conflicting thoughts with team members.
Therefore it is necessary to manage conflicts in a way such that it has minimum impact on our lives.
Unresolved conflicts can be hazardous especially at workplaces.
They can lead to inappropriate behavior such as avoidance, inability to work in teams, verbal assaults, and overall resentment.
In worst cases, some of the employees in the organization become so hostile that they eventually have to quit their work and separate from the organization.

b) Stress Management:

All of us are living a fast-paced demanding life, dealing with work pressure, home responsibilities, and other commitments all the time that leads to stress.
This stress becomes a part and parcel of our life.
However, managing stress is extremely important.
Stress has a lot of harmful effects on our bodies and mind.
People under stress often experience headaches, anxiety, depression, negative thoughts, nausea, anger, frustration, etc.
Hence to avoid these problems, maintaining stress is extremely important.

Regular Exercising, changing the routine work, yoga, meditation, and breathing exercises are great ways to combat stress.

The ultimate goal to manage stress is to lead a balanced life.
Some people with stress is to smoke and consume large amounts of alcohol.
Also, avoid eating or sleeping too much when you are stressed because this will make you lethargic.
Relax, rejuvenate and recharge yourself so that you can function more efficiently.

DECISION-MAKING SKILLS:

A Systematic Approach for Making Decisions
In real-life business situations, decisions can often fail because the best alternatives are not clear at the outset, or key factors are not considered as part of the process.
To stop this from happening, you need to bring problem-solving and decision-making strategies together to clarify your understanding.
A logical and ordered process can help you to do this by making sure that you address all of the critical elements needed for a successful outcome.
Working through this process systematically will reduce the likelihood of overlooking important factors.

Our seven-step approach takes this into account:

1. Create a constructive environment.
2. Investigate the situation in detail.
3. Generate good alternatives.
4. Explore your options.
5. Select the best solution.
6. Evaluate your plan.
7. Communicate your decision, and take action.

Let’s look at each of these steps in detail.

Step 1: Create a Constructive Environment

Decisions can become complex when they involve or affect other people, so it helps to create a constructive environment in which to explore the situation and weigh up your options.

Step 2: Investigate the Situation in Detail

Before you can begin to make a decision, you need to make sure that you fully understand your situation.
It may be that your objective can be approached in isolation, but it’s more likely that there are a number of interrelated factors to consider.
Changes made in one department, for example, could have knock-on effects elsewhere, making the change counter-productive.

Step 3: Generate Good Alternatives

The wider the options you explore, the better your final decision is likely to be.
Generating a number of different options may seem to make your decision more complicated at first, but the act of coming up with alternatives forces you to dig deeper and look at the problem from different angles.

Step 4: Explore Your Options

When you’re satisfied that you have a good selection of realistic alternatives, it’s time to evaluate the feasibility, risks, and implications of each one.
Almost every decision involves some degree of risk.
Use Risk Analysis to consider this objectively by adopting a structured approach to assessing threats, and evaluating the probability of adverse events
occurring – and what they might cost to manage.

Step 5: Select the Best Solution

Once you’ve evaluated the alternatives, the next step is to make your decision.
If one particular alternative is clearly better than the rest, your choice will be obvious.
However, if you still have several competing options, there are plenty of tools that will help you decide between them.

Group Decisions:

If your decision is being made within a group, there are plenty of excellent tools and techniques to help you to reach a group decision.
If the decision criteria are subjective, and it’s critical that you gain consensus, Multi-Voting can help your team reach an agreement.
When anonymity is important, decision-makers dislike one another, or there is a tendency for certain individuals to dominate the process, use the Delphi
Technique to reach a fair and impartial decision.
This uses cycles of anonymous, written discussion and argument, managed by a facilitator.
Participants do not meet, and sometimes they don’t even know who else is involved.

Step 6: Evaluate Your Plan

With all the effort and hard work you’ve already invested in evaluating and selecting alternatives, it can be tempting to forge ahead at this stage. But now, more than ever is the time to “sense check” your decision.
Before you start to implement your decision, take a long, dispassionate look at it to be sure that you have been thorough, and that common errors haven’t crept into the process.

Step 7: Communicate Your Decision, and Take Action

Once you’ve made your decision, you need to communicate it to everyone affected by it in an engaging and inspiring way.
Get them involved in implementing the solution by discussing how and why you arrived at your decision.
The more information you provide about risks and projected benefits, the more likely people will be to support your decision.

Types of conflict

Conflict can occur at three levels:

Intrapersonal conflict:

This conflict arises within an individual because there is competition in the business world or you can say that everywhere in the world. E.g.
A manager may take up the role of providing better facilities to the employees and at the same time may be responsible to reduce the operating costs.

Interpersonal Conflict:

This conflict arises because of disagreement between two persons in an organization.
It happens because of differences in personality or temperaments among two or more individuals.
E.g. it may be failures in communication among the people.
Such conflicts pose a major problem because; they threaten the self-esteem and self-image of a person.
Such conflicts may damage the relationships between people in an organization.

Intergroup Conflict:

It takes place when one group such as a department disagrees with another group.
Due to the difference in viewpoint or thinking and honesty towards the organization intergroup conflict take place.
A major cause for intergroup conflicts is competition for scarce resources.
E.g. production department may want to install the latest machinery and the marketing department may want to invest in setting up showrooms and organizations able to satisfy only one department idea.

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