Its important to manage conflict at workplace

Some conflicts are good as they result in thinking outside the box and taking performance to higher levels. Others can be counterproductive, resulting in diminished morale and productivity at the workplace. Most undesired conflicts arise because employees do not see eye-to-eye on issues related to work and sometimes over personal matters.

Managers today are faced with managing an increasingly diverse workforce that represents people migrating between different parts of the country, expatriates working in their companies’ India operations, younger and older generations mingling with each other, with young CEOs and VPs often managing older subordinates, and other variables that create a context for individual differences to come to the fore. Gone are the days when employers could de-emphasise individual differences to create an army of homogenous employees that was expected to leave behind their personalities at home.

The new professional mantra at the workplace celebrates and most importantly, makes use of individual personality differences, as these differences are important to foster creative thinking. Such thinking is needed to sustain a business in a dynamic environment pummeled by recession, high turnovers and a rapidly changing nature of competition.
These very individual differences, however, will likely lead to conflicts when individuals with contrasting and even subtle differences in aspects of their personalities clash within workplace contexts.

Workplace friction is not limited to the odd balls that have significant interpersonal issues with most team members. Employees in today’s workplaces need to understand not only their teams better but also themselves, in order to fully comprehend the personal underpinnings to workplace conflicts with peers and reportees, and ways to overcome these conflicts.

Take the example of an employee who habitually applies a logical and rational way of decision-making. Contrast this person with a peer who is concerned about others’ well being and adopts a compassionate approach to decision-making. It’s easy to understand potential situations of conflict when these two individuals come in contact in shared decision-making situations.

Clearly, an insight into such differences in approaching workplace requirements such as decision-making and team work will enable the management to better resolve conflicts and more importantly, prevent conflicts by helping employees understand their own and the idiosyncratic behaviors of their colleagues. 

While broad personality types such as extraversion or introversion are easy to identify and relate to, individual differences in personality in many situations do not manifest themselves as different personality types but as subtle differences between people of the same type. Such differences are harder to spot but nevertheless, influence peoples’ interpersonal relations at the workplace, including their ability to manage and resolve conflicts.

Current personality assessments may focus on identifying broad personality types without digging deeper into facet level interpretations of individual differences. Perhaps, what’s required are assessments that will offer this deeper insight into why individuals behave the way they do, and at a level that is more personal and meaningful for the employee. The learning that takes place from this information will also facilitate better communication among employees, eventually resulting in more functional teams.

Although conflict management is an important application of workplace personality assessment, the benefits of such an assessment go well beyond smoothing out bumps in day-to-day operations. Strategic thinking required from the organisation’s leadership depends, eventually, on the kind of person entrusted with this job in the organisation.

A leader needs to direct her energies in the right direction, process information optimally, take decisions that make the best business sense, deal with the workplace environment and most importantly react to stress in a manner that creates harmony in her surroundings. Therefore, assessing personality for leadership coaching becomes relevant for HR that will spend a considerable amount of time and people resources to identify the right kind of leadership for its organisations.

Perhaps at no period in the history of the workplace than today, are managers and HR professionals looking at factors way beyond skill sets and compensation, to gauge what impacts high performance.

Personality and the resultant behaviour have always impacted how people view their work, peers and their short and long-term goals in organisations. It is today, in the context of the twenty first century workforce, that personality is rightfully gaining its seat as worthy of objective and accurate assessment at the workplace and worth its weight in gold. Indeed understanding personality is golden.

(The writer is Marketing Head, Pearson Clinical and Talent Assessment)