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Conflict Management and Resolution
As an engineering manager, conflict management is a part of my day-to-day work. But luckily, the conflicts that I need to manage at work are generally just alignment issues between people who’re generally rational and well-meaning towards each other. This makes the resolution quite easy.
Unfortunately, unrelated to work, I always got exposed to bigger conflicts with trickier resolution in the form of various political debates and corruption cases in the scope of international politics, Indonesian politics (because I’m based in Indonesia), and US politics (because as a tech worker, I follow a lot of tech workers based in the US on Twitter).
Due to how many problems I see every day, I can’t help but thinking how it could be resolved. These thoughts led me to think quite a lot about how I usually resolve conflicts and what approaches I usually take.
While I’m no psychologist and have no formal training in psychology, I do have some knowledge about it from reading psychology textbooks over the years and applying what I’ve learned in various situations I encounter in my daily life. So what I’m going to say doesn’t qualfy as an expert opinion.
Behavioral Perspective
One perspective I usually use is the behavioral perspective, which I mostly use for conflicts where I can identify the rewards and punishments that might be at play in influencing the involved parties’ decisions in the conflict.
I tend to use this approach when I can identify certain rules the parties in conflict follow and what they aim to achieve or avoid by following the said rules. What kind of reward would they get from winning in the confict, and what kind of punishment would they get from losing it?
For example, if we have someone from the IT support team and someone from the HR team in a disagreement about how to manage the IT support personnel’s work arrangements, the IT support staff is probably aiming to make the setup as comfortable as possible for their team while still enabling them to deliver, while the HR staff is probably aiming to make it easier for them to measure the IT team’s performance from their availability throughout the shifts they need to cover.
Psychodynamic Perspective
I tend to approach the problem using the psychodynamic perspective for conflicts where the parties involved don’t display strong awareness of what they’re trying to gain from the conflict or where the result of the conflict will end in a lose-lose situations if it continues. Especially from the Jungian perspective.
While Jungian psychology might be considered unscientific, I found Jung’s concepts of ego (the conscious self) and shadow (the unconscious self) quite useful in this case to try modeling what might be the primary motivations of the parties involved and what unconscious factors might be at play in influencing their perspectives and actions.
It’s a bit hard for me to come up with an example scenario of this from an office work setting because I tend to use this approach where I find the parties involved in the conflict to be emotionally-driven, irrational, and unreasonable to the point where I can’t use the behavioral perspective. In a healthy organization, this kind of conflict should be pretty rare because their interests in the context of the organization and their interactions with fellow workers should be mainly within a professional context.
Also, this approach is quite hard to pull because I’ll need to know the parties involved in the conflict quite well to notice what they’re conscious and unconscious of about themselves, and if there anything about their self that they’re desperately trying to repress or reject that might unconsciously affect their behavior in that case. I generally don’t get to know people that well in office settings, and trying to do so without their consent would count as a violation of their privacy.
Therefore, my use of this approach is mostly limited to resolving conflicts among friends or family members.
Conflict Resolution Approach
Regardless of which approach I use as described above, the following is the questions I need to ask when starting to engage the conflict situation:
- What are the parties involved in this conflict trying to achieve?
- How important is it for them to achieve it?
- What are their bare minimum expectations out of this conflict?
- Is this a zero-sum game? Is there a way for both sides to win?
- What arrangement would give the result that meets both sides’ bare minimum expectation, at least?
- Is there a better arrangement that can resolve this conflict while having both sides end up with better gains?
The main focus should start from minimizing losses for both sides, and then trying to optimize the gains for both starting from there.
When there are clear identifiable reward systems for both sides in the conflict and the involved parties are rational, these questions tend to be easier to answer. But that doesn’t mean we can’t resolve conflicts between irrational parties, we can but we’ll need some additional steps and effort to do that.
If we can’t find any clear reward systems for one or more parties involved and we’re not sure if their reward systems are rational, we’ll need to perform an extra step to define their reward systems. This isn’t always easy to do, because they themselves might not be aware of it (remember the unconscious self we mentioned in the previous section).
For this, there’s another set of question we must ask:
- Are they really irrational, or is there a whole new reward system they’re using that we’re not aware of?
- If they’re really irrational, what are the possible causes of this behavior?
- Is there anything they’re afraid of or something they’re trying to compensate for with the behavior they’re displaying?
- How do they think and feel about the behavior they’re showing?
- Is there anything they hate in the other party for no particular reason which might exist and be repressed within themselves?
The information we get after investigating from those questions should help us build a new model for their reward systems to be used for the conflict resolution.
If we happen to be one of the conflicting parties, we probably should try finding it out in the case of ourselves also in order to make the process and judgment as fair as possible.