Management and Organisations essay

Submitted By anikono1
Words: 1501
Pages: 7

Management and Organizations
Professional Business Report
Date: 29/03/2012

Table of Contents
Introduction 3

organisational conflict 3

Cultural differences 4

Comparison of Organizational conflict and Cultural differences 4

Contrasting conflicts and Cultural differences 5

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………………………….5

Introduction:
In this report, I am going to discuss the organizational conflict and cultural differences. First of all, I am going to look at conflicts at work. In other words, do conflicts bring benefits or it is completely undesirable practice. Secondly, I am going to turn to cultural differences. For example, is it beneficial for companies to hire people of different nationalities and if yes what pluses this might bring to the company. Finally, I am going to compare and contrast the conflict based on cultural differences. In other words, does the cultural difference at work brings more conflict within the organization or it gives the organization a breath of fresh air and new innovative ideas.

Organizational conflict:
First of all, there is a traditional view, that conflicts are ruining the harmony in working relationships. According to Mullins (2010), ‘Conflict is consequently seen as undesirable and a dysfunctional outcome that can be explained, for example, by poor communication, personality clashes or the work of agitators’. Therefore, organizations are trying to avoid conflicts, because they think, that there might be bad consequences for the organization and for employees. However, in any organization, conflicts will occur and there will be more use in not avoiding the conflict but taking an advantage of it, by carefully managing it and observing in order to reconcile rival interests.
For example as stated in Mullins (2010): ‘A more recent view of conflict is the interactionist perspective, which believes that conflict is a positive force and necessary for effective performance. This approach encourages a minimum level of conflict within the group in order to encourage self-criticism, change and innovation and to help prevent apathy or too great a tolerance for harmony and the status quo’
The problem occurs when people are not expressing their views openly but they are doing it in working manner. In other words, there might be a jealousy of token higher status at work and people might create a conflict on purpose so that this will affect all the work in negative way. Therefore, there needs to be a line, where working relationships and goals towards the good future of the company do not clash with personal reasons. Studies undertaken by suggest that,
‘In managing conflict competitively, people interact in ways that lead them to conclude that they are better off when others act ineffectively; when others are productive, they are less likely to succeed themselves. They convey that they want to use conflict to promote their goals at the expense of their other. They want to ‘win’ and have the others to ‘lose’.
What is more, conflicts may occur through such mechanisms as evaluation. According to ‘researchers and consultants have developed process interventions, designed to separate evaluation from the generation of ideas in groups under the premise that ideas will flow more freely if there is a period in which there is little risk of evaluation’. That is to say, that there was a set of rules to guide the groups during the brainstorming time, which included the ‘evaluation-free’ period, where ideas were generated, but not evaluated, members initially brainstormed ideas privately. After all ideas were generated, the group was engaged in discussion where all ideas were brought to the table and could have been evaluated in order to generate a solution.

Cultural differences:
To turn to cultural differences, many countries started to increase the cultural diversity within the organization. It is believed