Constructive Conflict

Constructive conflict is one of the way that team structures to improve decision making. It’s a group of people focusing their discussion on issue while maintaining their respect with other people that having different point of view. Conflict is better defined as a relationship between persons or groups in which one or more parties manifest the belief that they have incompatible goals. (Kriesberg, 2015) The interesting part is all of the team members have to contribute and share ideas during discussion; it can generate better ideas the possibility of producing high-quality ideas and decisions just because different people have different matter of perspective. Different viewpoints can make every different ideas be considered and clarified. In order to encourage team member to participate in group discussion, it is vital to create an comfortable environment that can let team member feels that his/her opinions, thoughts, ideas are needed by the team and the same time, every team member has to feel comfortable by sharing opinions to the team and speak up without any feelings of being fear. The advantage of this process is team leader can collect different viewpoints and obtain desired positive outcomes, this encourage team member to study their expectations and judgments.

The disadvantage of constructive conflict is that process easily slides into personal attacks, we might be having emotional effects of conflict while voicing out our opinions out to all. This is because everyone has different points of view, and this might easily cause conflict between individuals & groups. Conflict behaviour is so omnipresent in organizational life. (Evert van de Vliert, 1999)  When team members have low level of emotional intelligence, they are less likely to control their emotions during debate, the risk of having personal attack with other team members are higher than team member that have high emotional intelligence.

Bibliography

Evert van de Vliert, A. N. (1999). Constructive Conflict at Work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 475-491.

Kriesberg, L. (2015). Basic ideas of the constructive conflict approach. A constructive conflict approach to world struggles, 23-36.

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