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Conflict management is a crucial knowledge area for project managers. An understanding of the conflict process and possessing a toolkit of conflict prevention and resolution techniques will benefit a project manager who wants to maintain team cohesion and project performance. Research has shown that project managers spend a minimum of 20% of their time dealing with conflicts.
But conflicts are not inherently bad for projects. It is beneficial for the project manager to view conflicts as a process that is continuous and cyclical with alternative phases of cooperation and conflict. When conflicts arise in the project, the current equilibrium is disrupted but with resolution of the conflict, positive outcomes can arise such as innovation, greater self-awareness and learning.
There is an interdependent relationship between cooperation and conflict, and it is up to the project manager to balance these phases by preparing conflict analysis, solutioning and review to reduce negative outcomes of conflicts and convert conflicts into more constructive collaboration.
Common Conflict Scenarios in Project Management
According to research (Sudhakar, 2015), the top 5 most difficult conflict reasons to deal with in projects are:
Cultural differences,
Value difference,
Personality difference,
Differences in technical opinions and approach,
Different perspectives.
These conflicts are difficult to resolve since they revolve around an individual’s deeply embedded beliefs. In such cases, the project manager should be aiming to shift the focus of conflicting parties to the project’s vision. It is only required for conflicting parties to recognise and respect each other’s difference for collaborative strategies to be effective.
Distinguish Productive Disputes from Harmful Ones
In fact, task conflict is something to be desired in the early phases of a project. This is because creativity is at its highest at moderate levels of task conflict during early stages of the team life cycle. Task conflicts result from differences in opinions and viewpoints about project tasks.
Conflicts revolving around distribution of resources, procedures, policies and interpretation of facts trigger greater information exchange, re-evaluation of the status quo and scrutiny of the task itself. This results in creativity as cognitive conflict is introduced where project team members are exposed to differing perspectives and can combine their old and new perspectives.
Task conflict is crucial to increasing divergent thinking and minimising premature consensus being reached. Project managers do need to be wary of too much task conflict as an overload of possibilities makes it difficult for the project team to arrive at a coherent solution.
A retention of some level of convergent thinking is required to progress towards a creative outcome. Why task conflicts are most beneficial at early phases of the project is because the project team is primarily engaged in idea and strategy generation.
During these stages of the project life cycle, project managers should embrace the attitude of allowing for some level of task conflict and allowing for enough time for team members to voice their task-related opinions to motivate them in generating novel ideas. To facilitate this, the project manager needs to build a psychologically safe team climate providing resources, openness and time. Task conflict will not benefit the project if the project manager doesn’t intentionally find ways to integrate the ideas raised by team members into an ultimate creative solution.
At the early stages of a project, there should be a balance between task, relationship and process conflicts. Relationship conflicts are related to stakeholders and their interpersonal incompatibility issues. Process conflicts refer to conflicts surrounding duties and resource delegation in who will do what and how much. Where task conflict increases the quality of decisions and performance in projects, process conflicts reduce team productivity, performance and morale. It is also found that relationship conflicts are low in high performing project teams.
There is a need for strong communication, clear roles and robust leadership to maintain relationships during project conflicts and for a mutually beneficial solution to be found.
REFERENCES
Lee, C. (2010). Task conflict and team creativity: a question of how much and when. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2432666
Sudhakar, G. P. (2015). A REVIEW OF CONFLICT MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES IN PROJECTS. Brazilian Journal of Operations & Production Management, 12(2), 214. https://doi.org/10.14488/bjopm.2015.v12.n2.a3
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