Conflict Management And Resolution

In addition, justification can be made to emphasize that both conflict management and conflict resolution are two distinct entity, because before a conflict can be resolved among a team, the members of the team needs to understand the root of the conflict (Porter, 2004). As a result, Engleberg (2003), reports the 4Rs necessary to provide steps that will bring the team's understanding to the conflict before the appropriate management method can be used.

The first of the 4Rs talks about the "reason" for the conflict. At the reasoning stage, members undertake the action to find out the cause of the conflict by each member openly and calmly communicating about the issue at stake. This discussion is done in a decent and respectful way even though members are facing disagreement against each other. Second of the 4Rs is "Reaction". This step analyze the process where each member on the team assess their own reactions towards the conflict to see if they bring positive or negative attribute to the team. If possible, after assessing their reaction and defining the cause to see their negative perception, member's then will correct their actions and re-contribute effectively to the success of the team (Engleberg, 2003).

Furthermore, the third of the 4R's illustrates about the "Results." At this point, if members have still not been able to resolve the conflict among themselves, accordingly, they debate on what will happen next. In other words, how the team can work together to resolve the conflict in a productive manner so that the team can move on. Last of the 4R's is "Resolution." This final step of the method in analyzing the team conflict suggest that since members were unable to resolve the conflict, a decision needs to be made to determine which conflict resolution method is appropriate to resolve the conflict among the team. As a result, members are now faced with a decision in choosing an approach to resolve the conflict (Engleberg, 2003).

Clearly, since a thorough analysis has been done to detect the root of the conflict, members decision in choosing the appropriate approach to resolve the conflict can be any of the following approaches reported by Kilman and Thomas. According to Kilman and Thomas (2002), even though resolving a conflict is conditional and none of these approaches provides the best resolution, based on the appropriate guidelines, members can still determine which approach best fit their situation.

First on the list is the "Avoidance" approach that talks about how member's keep away from the particular conflict issue and move on to other discussions, because the issue at stake might not be important to the team's productivity. In addition, this approach also relieves pressure when situation is out of control and emotions are growing in. Next, when members choose the avoidance approach they can reschedule team meetings so that each member can have the time to look at the conflict in different perception, control their emotions and anger and subsequently move on (DeJanasz, Dowd, Schneider, 2001).

Another approach members can use is the "accommodation." This can be also called the smoothing approach says DeJanasz-Dowd-Schneider, in his book, "Interpersonal Skills in Organization", because this allows members to evenly protect their relationship rather than solving the particular