Top 5 causes of workplace conflicts and what to do about them
Frustrated Businessman During A Business Meeting In Office
Just like any other place, conflicts can occur in a workplace environment. Employees have different backgrounds, values, personalities, perceptions, interests, cultures, and expectations at work. So it’s but natural that conflicts arise from time to time with so many contrasting features at play.
Leaving conflicts unresolved could promote a hostile working environment. Conflicts are inevitable, but understanding their primary causes could be an eye-opener to managing employees effectively. This would help reduce the occurrences of conflict among them.
With proper conflict resolution in place, employees and their managers could have a better work environment, leading to improved working relationships and productivity. Here are the top 5 causes of workplace conflicts and what to do about them.
- Personality clashes
Workplaces tend to hire people with diverse personalities, which often results in conflicts. After all, you can’t possibly employ people with the same personality. Having different personalities at work may not be a bad thing in itself. In fact, it could help to encourage initiative and get the job done.
There are employees who fail to understand and accept that not all people are the same. And you’d have to work with people who may not agree with you all the time to achieve a common work goal. As a result, conflict could be a constant thing in a work environment where employees don’t understand this concept.
Employees in the workplace need effective corporate conflict resolution training to accept each other’s fundamental differences and personalities. Having a level of mutual respect toward the way others do things would prevent constant conflict. With good training, employees could establish better approaches to resolving their differences to achieve their common goals. When employees get along with each other, there’d be a renewed strength in their outcome level.
Exhausted male and female employees can’t make agreement, arguing. Angry business people having a tense brainstorm, african american woman boss is screaming, feeling frustrated
Ineffective communication
Communication is an indispensable tool in the workplace. Ineffective communication could lead to loss of essential information, confusion, wrongful termination, repressed innovation, lower productivity, mistrust, frustration, and unsatisfied employees.
Workplaces that suffer from ineffective communication among employees or between the management and employees often lack the right communication know-how and tools to interact well. Implementing excellent communication skills, tools, and strategies could help resolve this problem.
Both the management and employees need to learn to listen to each other, be clear about the information they put out, study nonverbal messages, and use modern communication tools to bring about an easier way of communicating with each other. A dialogue system may also be established among employees and between employees and their managers.
- Resistance to change
Resistance to change is another leading cause of workplace conflicts, and managers find themselves dealing with employees who are constantly resistant to change. Adapting to organizational changes isn’t easy, and resistance is the natural reaction to change. It’s easy to get used to the way things are done, making it difficult to accept new rules or changes.
Resistance could come in different forms, such as lower output, constant quarrels, transfer requests, and resigning from the job. A common solution to resolving resistance to changes in a workplace is to engage the employees in the cause for change.
The management could organize practical training sessions for employees to understand their new responsibilities and communicate their reasons for change. With this, the employees would gradually overcome resistance and accept that change is vital for their workplace to grow.
- Changes in job expectation
Conflict in a workplace could also be a result of changes in job expectations. Some job expectations may not have been well explained to employees during the process of recruitment. Sometimes employees take up a job based on their own expectations and interpretation of the role, only to be disappointed when they start doing the job.
There are also situations where employees have to work overtime and sacrifice their personal time. All these unexpected job demands may cause unhappiness among employees, making them susceptible to conflicts.
To manage this problem, the management may need to find ways to always inform employees about changes in their workloads and discuss ways to compensate for any demands outside the job role. Hiring more employees to relieve excessive workload and proper training could also help employees devise better-coping methods with their new job expectations.
- Competition
Competition may be a good force, depending on how a workplace utilizes it. A competitive, hostile environment may result in conflicts. It may put employees under unnecessary pressure to outdo one another, resulting in a stressful and unproductive workplace.
Constant comparison of performance could also trigger destructive emotional reactions. Fostering a competitive spirit among employees for them to excel in their respective fields isn’t mandatory. However, in a workplace where promotion and monetary issuance, among other things, is based on the performance of individuals, competition isn’t entirely avoidable.
Implementing work strategies that communicate effectively to workers that they aren’t competing against each other but rather working as a team to achieve a common goal would help in the resolution of conflicts in a competitive workplace.
Conclusion
It’s common to find conflicts in a work environment due to the different factors at play. Although it’s impossible to eliminate conflicts, work managers could work on minimizing conflicts and promoting a healthy work environment. As an employee or manager, learning about the common reasons for conflicts in a workplace could help resolve the major points of disagreement and agreement. With the right conflict resolution strategies, it’s possible to develop a productive and harmonious work environment.
