Organizational Conflict

After reading through Bolman and Deal's chapter regarding interpersonal and group dynamics, I realized that many of the same themes that pervade mainstream management theory are present in their discussion of organizational conflict. They begin with a focus on interpersonal skills and interaction, and then go on to describe factors such as emotional intelligence, management style, and both formal and informal roles within an organizational hierarchy. While these are most certainly important determinants of a groups interaction norms, I find that the chapter does not do much to mention what I find is the greatest source of conflict in an organization: task interdependence.

As I mentioned in last week's post, I work at as a server in a restaurant in my home town over my summers off of school. Overall, I would say that the restaurant team - managers, servers, kitchen, and bus staff - generally experienced a functional and productive amount of conflict. Process disagreements and constructive input were always accepted and appreciated, however leadership was careful to ensure that conflict within the restaurant never got to a level where it interfered with the productivity and satisfaction of the employees or customers. Thankfully, interpersonal conflict such as arguments and personal disagreements were minimal and generally could be worked through. What made the level of organizational conflict functional at the restaurant was the centrality of task interdependence as the source of the conflict. Since each separate team must be both internally functional and externally functional with the other teams to provide service, everyone needed to perform their own tasks efficiently while simultaneously communicating with others. For example, when managers communicated with the staff, it was always relating to what a team or individual was doing and how they were doing it. 

A common source of conflict was slow service. If a manager noticed that a party had been seated for a long time without being served or if a customer raised a complaint, he or she would immediately set about rectifying the mistake by identifying the source of the conflict and consulting the parties involved. For slow service, it meant that either the server was too slow to address the table, get their order, and input it into the ordering system, or that the kitchen did not receive the order or that they had overlooked it in some way (either due to lack of attention or confusion from busy service). Once the source of the conflict was identified, the managers would go about rectifying it by first informing the dependent team of their overlooked table or order, then informing the team or person at fault of their mistake. Finally, they would speak with the customers so as to inform them of the service timing they could expect. This management method allowed for constructive criticism when one's service was less than spectacular while simultaneously addressing potential breakdowns of communication between the service and kitchen teams. Ultimately, this seemed (to me at least) like an effective way to manage the intergroup conflict that arose from task interdependence.