1.4 Sources of Conflict

When it comes to using negotiation to manage conflict, the first thing you must do is develop a thorough understanding of what the source of the conflict is or where the conflict is coming from. As it turns out, there are many potential sources of conflict and tension. While in some instances that source may be obvious to everyone involved, in other instances it may be unclear, and it can have a debilitating effect on any further attempts at conflict management if it goes unrecognized. You can only start to reach a true resolution to a conflict once you have done the work of deciphering and understanding the conflict’s underlying source. In this section, we will walk through some common sources of conflict and tension and how they may be resolved.

Poor Communication

Any form of communication opens up the opportunity for miscommunication. This has never been truer than in today’s interconnected, networked, and wired world. For example, messages can be misspelled, mistakenly sent, delayed, or even go unread, causing either senders or recipients to feel their time is not being valued the way it should be. Frequently, conflict begins where people interpret these kinds of miscommunication as personal affronts or deliberate gestures when in reality they are often honest mistakes.1

That said, honest mistake or not, small failures of communication can lead to further misunderstandings, which can lead to incorrect assumptions. This in turn can lead to other conflicts. And the unfortunate truth of this is that as our lives become more digital, these mishaps will continue to happen more often. If you try to trace any conflict back to its source, chances are you will find bad communication as the cause of it somewhere along the way. While knowing how miscommunication can cause conflict won’t prevent it from happening in the world and in our interconnected lives, it helps to be conscious of what a common occurrence miscommunication is. In fact, acknowledging any miscommunication that has taken place between you and the other party can become common ground in even a contentious conflict, which is all you need to start working toward a resolution.

History of Conflict

Sometimes, the source of a conflict can be a previously unresolved conflict.2 This might especially be the case if the terms of the present conflict seem irrational or unreasonable. For example, Ashley may secretly harbor a deep resentment toward Jeremiah, one of her coworkers, because of the one time Jeremiah took her idea and presented it as his own during a company-wide meeting and received all the credit for that idea. Because Ashley never directly confronted Jeremiah about this and resolved the conflict, her unresolved resentment will be stewing until it finally comes out in some other, unrelated form. Perhaps the following week, Ashley decides to circulate a negative rumor about Jeremiah as her way of getting even. Or perhaps her approach will not be as directly malicious, but rather she will cease being able to work productively and cooperatively with Jeremiah. Through either ignoring him or treating him dismissively, Ashley’s behavior will begin to produce its own kind of hostile work environment. Jeremiah could in turn lash out at some small disrespect or inconvenience. To everyone else, it will seem there is a heated conflict between two people in the office, seemingly for no reason other than their personalities.

On the surface, this situation may seem like two hotheads going at each other, but what’s really going on is an unaddressed initial conflict and a toxic pattern of behavior. Though this is just one illustration, it shows that good conflict management is important because unresolved conflicts become bigger conflicts. Everyone is best served by being open and direct about their perceived conflicts and dealing with them as soon as possible. It’s all the more reason to reserve judgment in the conflicts you encounter, because you can’t know what’s really going on until everyone has had a chance to express their own position.

Personal Differences

People will be people, and that means there will be certain personal differences and incompatibilities between them. One person may find something rude that another finds wildly amusing. People may hold conflicting ideas of how something ought to be done. For instance, one coworker might see nothing wrong with grabbing a few bags of chips from the break room to bring home at the end of the day. Another coworker might see this as a serious breach of ethics and therefore feel that their convictions have been violated. This is a rather common occurrence both in the workplace and in everyday life, simply because every person has thoughts and experiences that differ from those of other people.

It’s also worth noting that people have been chosen to be in a particular workplace based on their skills or expertise—not necessarily based on their personal beliefs or interpersonal compatibilities. As more and more people work together, both in physical offices and in online spaces, these differences among people inevitably become greater sources of friction. On one hand, it is unreasonable for anyone to expect they can somehow fix what ultimately boils down to differences in personality, beliefs, values, and ways of doing things. On the other hand, we can make progress by approaching these differences with patience and acceptance.

There is one caveat to all of this, which is that conflicts due to personal differences can be exacerbated when personal values conflict with business values. While you cannot always expect to be on the same page as your employer or employees or coworkers on a personal level, it is still imperative that you establish common ground in terms of your business values, including integrity, ethical behavior, and professional conduct. Without this common ground, the chances are low when it comes to working together productively and without conflict.

Conflicting Goals

It is natural to assume that conflict arises when people have differing goals, but in some cases, the source of the conflict can be more nuanced than this. For instance, in the case of a divorce, the disputing parties usually have the same goal, which is to get as much as possible for themselves in the division of assets. In an organizational setting, everyone in a company ought to have the same goal of doing a good job and reaching key performance metrics to contribute to the company’s growth and success. However, whether a company is big enough to split into different departments or is a small start-up company with only a few members, there can be differing opinions, approaches, or goals for reaching the common goal of continued growth and success.

For instance, when the common goal is building an incredible new shopping mall, an architect’s goal may be to come up with the most impressive design, whereas the engineers will want the most feasible and sturdy build. This difference in their approaches can make both parties lose sight of the fact that, ultimately, they are working toward the same goal.

As another example, a gym manager wants to hire more personal trainers so the gym can offer more classes to bring in more revenue, but HR will not allow the manager to hire anyone else because they are committed to staying within their allotted budget. Both the manager and HR want the same thing, which is for the gym to succeed, but their approaches are completely different. Without the proper training or knowledge to conduct thorough conflict management and see how their overall goals are the same, they may come to feel that their respective goals are at odds and that they are therefore in opposition to each other.

Interdependence

In the workplace, interdependence refers to a situation in which some employees rely on other employees to be able to perform their job. This can quickly become a source of conflict if the employees are hindered from completing their own tasks by the other employees.3 Let us look at an example that takes place in a café. If the café’s milk was not restocked during the previous shift, a barista’s ability to quickly serve customers will be immediately hindered. Now the barista will have to move twice as fast to keep up with the pace of orders while taking care of the milk situation, which ought to have been dealt with by someone else. The orders will begin to back up, the line will stop moving, and the customers will become annoyed that they have to wait longer than they usually do for their drink. Some of them may even complain to the manager about this delay—all because someone forgot to restock the milk.

Perhaps in an imaginary company that never experiences conflict, every employee would have independent tasks that would not rely on anyone else’s work to be completed. Unfortunately, this is rarely ever the case. Today, few people can accomplish their work all by themselves. Most tasks and projects require many hands in order to be completed. For this reason, if one person or team deviates from the schedule, it can create a conflict that involves everyone from the ground up.

Resource Scarcity

As we discussed earlier in this course, most conflicts take place due to two or more parties desiring to claim ownership of some scarce or limited resource. This happens often in the workplace. For example, in a company where the margins are quite thin, the marketing team may believe that winning a few new clients would be the best use of the remaining budget. The production team might feel like those dollars would be better spent on creating more goods. This creates an internal conflict. Furthermore, an organization’s own reward system can become a potential source of conflict—especially if the organization’s reward system establishes a win-lose environment when it comes to employee rewards. For example, the organization could have set a policy where only a certain percent of top-performing employees can be eligible for the most desirable raises and bonuses. This practice, which is not at all uncommon, immediately makes the work environment one of intense competition. Competition by its nature can incite conflict.

Even outside of raises and bonuses, companies may establish other rewards over which employees can become competitive, such as honors (like Employee of the Month) or other privileges that are in limited supply. This kind of competitiveness can create conflict between employees, between teams of employees, or between entire departments. Some amount of conflict over resources is inevitable in any organization. This is especially true for smaller businesses where things such as equipment, supplies, and money may be stretched thin to begin with. In order to minimize conflict, organizations must adopt a transparent attitude when it comes to the distribution of these resources. They must not allow themselves to give off even a whiff of favoritism in their decision-making.

Ambiguity

Finally, in cases where none of the above apply as sources of a conflict, then the conflict can usually be sourced back to the most basic and unintended form of miscommunication: ambiguity. Whether it’s ambiguous decision-making, ambiguous policies, or ambiguous communications, any ambiguity opens up the opportunity for confusion and misinterpretation, which in turn are breeding grounds for conflict.

For instance, it is not uncommon for an employee to be given two different tasks that are at odds with one another, sometimes by two different superiors. Similarly, some companies may have internal protocol for handling certain clients differently. They may offer special rates or treatments to favored clients that not every lower-level employee is aware of. Furthermore, company policies that conflict with each other can quickly generate a tense and negative working environment when employees feel that the rules they are being governed by do not hold up to scrutiny. Moreover, ambiguity in roles and positions can easily cause damaged feelings, as well as power struggles and retaliations. For example, if an employee takes on ownership of a new, higher-level role of their own accord or if they are regularly asked to fill in when the manager is absent, this could leave the employee feeling confused as to whether they are expected to be a boss or a subordinate.

In any of these cases, the fix is quite simple: transparency and proactive communication are needed, which will help to dispel ambiguity. Practicing a more direct and clearer communication of policies, intentions, and decisions is one of the simplest and easiest fixes for cutting short the potential for needless conflict before it is permitted to fester into a much bigger problem.