Groups & Teams Overview
Most people regard conflict as something to avoid at all costs. Still, we’d all agree that it’s a familiar, perennial, and powerful part of human interaction, including among groups and teams. In this chapter, we will define conflict, consider whether conflict is functional or dysfunctional, discuss the conflict process, and identify strategies for preventing and reducing conflict in groups.
Definitions of Conflict
Conflict is a state of discord caused by the actual or perceived opposition of needs, values, and/or interests between people working together. Conflict on teams takes many forms and can be minor, causing only brief disruption, or major, threatening the team’s ability to function and attain its goals.
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The Positive and Negative Sides of Conflict
There are some circumstances in which a moderate amount of conflict can be helpful. For example, conflict can stimulate innovation and change. Conflict can help individuals and group members grow and develop self-identities. As noted by Coser (1956):
Conflict, which aims at a resolution of tension between antagonists, is likely to have stabilizing and integrative functions for the relationship. By permitting immediate and direct expression of rival claims, such social systems are able to readjust their structures by eliminating their sources of dissatisfaction. The multiple conflicts which they experience may serve to eliminate the causes for dissociation and to reestablish unity. These systems avail themselves, through the toleration and institutionalization of conflict, of an important stabilizing mechanism.
Conflict can have negative consequences when people divert energies away from performance and goal attainment and direct them toward resolving the conflict. Continued conflict can take a heavy toll in terms of psychological well-being. Conflict has a major influence on stress and the psychophysical consequences of stress. Finally, continued conflict can also affect the social climate of the group and inhibit group cohesiveness.
Therefore, conflict can be either functional or dysfunctional depending upon the nature of the conflict, its intensity, and its duration. Indeed, both too much and too little conflict can lead to a variety of negative outcomes, as discussed above. In such circumstances, a moderate amount of conflict may be the best course of action. The issue for groups, therefore, is to eliminate conflict but rhow to manage and resolve it when it occurs.
Types of Conflict
Group conflicts may deal with many topics, needs, and elements. Kelly (2006) identified the following five types of conflict:
First, there are conflicts of substance. These conflicts, relate to questions about what choices to make in a given situation, rest on differing views of the facts. If Terry thinks the biology assignment requ