Conflict Management and Resolution in a Group or Team

Conflict Management and Resolution in a Group or Team

        When working in a team or group activity conflict may be the main reason that you are not reaching your goals or performing to the best of your abilities. My whole life up until this year I have been a part of a team and every team deals with conflict sometime or another. If you do anything with a group of people for an extended period of time you will have your ups and downs, whether it is disagreements or a part of the team acting as an individual and only looking out for their wants or needs. In college or even high school for that matter you will almost certainly be involved in at least one if not many group projects, which will sometimes bring you out of your comfort zone and rely you to count on complete strangers to complete their portions of assignments. Sometimes in these situations people tend not voice their opinions or step up to do tasks because they are nervous to voice themselves around strangers which can create a major conflict and in some cases hurt the group as a whole. For instance if there are multiple roles to be given to members of a group and someone is scared to pick a role because they do not want to take it away from another member who wants it then they often get stuck doing an assignment over something they do not care for or care about causing them to half-heartily do the same assignment. On another hand when group members must take on roles they cannot relate or do not care about it can sometimes be difficult to give maximum effort but you must come out of comfort zone to complete these simple tasks because your group is counting on you, whether it be a group of strangers or a group of your closest friends you still should not let them down.

        I believe that the main conflict in team activities is one’s ego, many times athletes get overconfident and try to boast or brag to their teammates about their abilities even if their statistics or even effort do not validate it. Teams are all about individuals putting aside their differences and self needs to come together and play as one. Assume conflict is happening, even if you don’t know about them (Hurley, j). When in a team atmosphere, especially at the college or professional level it may be hard for some of the members involved to put their egos aside and become a team player because their entire lives they have been the best player on the field at all times. But once you get to that next level it usually a rude awakening when finding out that you’re just another run of the mill player on that team and nobody cares or wants to care about what you did at the previous level.

        Another problem that may arise when working in a group is people pointing fingers at a group member instead of simply working to resolve the problem. This is a very simple and easy problem to fix or avoid; Drea Christopher states that the easiest ways to resolve conflict are to: express emotion, compromise, ask questions, and to inject humor. When something goes wrong in a group placing the blame on someone obviously seems like the easy way out, but in the long run it is much easier to just work with the person or people that caused the problem and as a group find a solution to it. Also another conflict is waiting too long to solve a problem that has occurred, when finding a problem you must fix it immediately because it is only going to get worse and create many more problems for your group. It is important to have acceptance and recognition of the differences, so your organization doesn't try to have a "one size fits all" method of managing (Diamond, A). When in a group you also want to voice your opinion without forcing the issue or being too assertive, but at the same time you do not want to be too reticent or bashful when stating your ideas or opinions as well. It is best to politely get your groups attention and display your idea to them, not every member of the group may not agree with your idea but they will definitely respect and appreciate how you displayed it which will create for a better team building atmosphere.