2.4 Essential Leadership Skills Required by Project Manager
2.4.4 Conflict Resolution Skill
Conflict can arise from disagreements in perception, opinion, or belief among team members (Prieto-Remón et al., 2015). Usually, conflict is unavoidable in projects and organizations. To be more exact, most of the project managers tend to spend at least 20% of their time dealing with conflicts (Sudhakar, 2015). The likelihood of conflict in development projects is generally high because it involves personnel from different backgrounds and perspectives working together to complete the projects. Proper conflict resolution skills may help project managers successfully handle and settle conflicts, resulting in a more productive organization as a whole (Gupta, Boyd, and Kuzmits, 2011). With that being said, understanding the causes of conflicts is critical to the project manager’s ability to deal with those conflicts more effectively. When conflict becomes dysfunctional, it frequently leads to bad project decision making, significant delays over issues, and disruption of the team’s activities (Mitkus and Mitkus, 2014). All these definitely will harm the project’s performance. On the other hand, conflict can be very helpful to the project when the project manager is able to turn those negative impacts into fresh knowledge and better team engagement which can boost the competitive spirit. To cut a long story short, a competent project manager should have conflict resolution skills to resolve conflict and thus, enhance overall project performance (Tabassi, Abdullah, and Bryde, 2018).
As previously mentioned, all workplaces tend to experience conflict.
This is where a competent project manager should recognize conflict and deal with it swiftly. To achieve this, project managers must understand the interaction of the organizational and behavioral elements in order to create an environment that can motivate the team’s demands. By doing so, the project manager is able to decrease unproductive conflict in the organization. Not only that, but a competent project manager with conflict resolution skills will have
the ability to effectively communicate with team members at all levels regarding both project objectives and important decisions (Mitkus and Mitkus, 2014).
Project status review meetings, which are held on a regular basis can be a useful communication tool for the project manager to reduce conflicts in the long run (Mnkandla, 2013). Additionally, effective project planning and contingency planning also can assist a project manager in eliminating or minimizing conflict before it impedes project performance.
Those conflicts that happened in projects can be further subdivided into two different categories (Appelbaum et al., 1999). These two categories of conflicts are cognitive conflicts and affective conflicts. Cognitive conflicts are task-oriented and deal with discrepancies in decision-making. Another phrase that has a similar meaning to cognitive conflicts is substantive conflicts.
Meanwhile, affective conflicts emphasize on differences in team members and their personalities rather than on the issue itself. By the same token, Armstrong and Lorentzen (1982) classified conflicts into vertical conflicts and horizontal conflicts. Vertical conflicts are those conflicts that tend to occur between superiors and subordinates, whereas horizontal conflicts occur mainly between project team members at the same level of hierarchy.
Despite the types of conflicts, there are five (5) conflict resolution techniques that the project manager should master in order to resolve conflicts more efficiently (Sudhakar, 2015). The first technique would be withdrawal or avoidance. It involves the action of ignoring, giving up, pulling out, or retreating from conflicts as much as possible. This method is suitable during the “cooling off” period. To be more precise, the project manager can adopt this technique to acquire a better understanding of the conflict scenario, as well as when either party involved in the conflict is aggressive and uncooperative. Withdrawal is a passive and impermanent approach to solve conflicts (Sudhakar, 2015).
Therefore, a competent project manager should not adopt this technique if the conflict involves issues that are urgent or critical to the project’s success. On top of that, the second technique is smoothing and accommodating (Thakore, 2013). This technique involves highlighting areas of conflict while ignoring matters of disagreement. The main purpose of this technique is to keep the team members at peace and prevent conflicting circumstances (Sudhakar, 2015). Not only that, but this smoothing technique is very beneficial when the conflict
arises is more vital than the viewpoints of the team members involved in the conflict (Thakore, 2013). However, one of the disadvantages of this technique is it only able to keep peace for a short period. That being stated, it is not a permanent long-term solution to solve any conflicts that arose throughout the project life cycle.
Apart from that, the third conflict resolution technique is compromise.
Project managers who adopt this technique will need to bargain and implement tradeoff negotiations to search for solutions that satisfy both parties involved in the conflict (Sudhakar, 2015). In this technique, both parties might feel disappointed for a short period of time since they have to give up something essential to them. In the end, neither party wins, yet both gain desired results from the conflict. The drawback of this technique is that certain crucial aspects of the project might be sacrificed to satisfy both parties’ personal goals.
Furthermore, the fourth conflict resolution technique that should be mastered by the project manager is collaboration (Overton and Lowry, 2013). This technique is suitable to be adopted when the project situation is not suitable to be sacrificed.
Collaborating is a powerful technique that involves incorporating numerous ideas and viewpoints from team members with different perspectives (Overton and Lowry, 2013). It normally provides a good opportunity for both parties to learn from one another. The active collaboration of both parties in contributing to the resolution makes it simpler for the project manager to obtain their consensus. However, this technique is not very effective when there are more than two parties involved in the conflict and their point of view are mutually incompatible.
The fifth conflict resolution technique that should be mastered by a competent project manager is confrontation (Thakore, 2013). This technique is appropriate to adopt in the project when both parties regard conflict as a problem and they are eager to look for a mutually acceptable solution. However, this conflict resolution technique necessitates a give-and-take mentality between both parties. In other words, both parties must be proactive and cooperative in solving the conflict. With that being said, a project manager should lead both parties to identify the root causes of the conflict by defining the conflict, acquiring essential information, proposing several solutions, and selecting the best solutions according to the conflict scenario. Although confrontation may
take a longer time to solve the conflict compared to other techniques, it is the only technique that delivers final solutions by ultimately resolving the underlying conflict (Thakore, 2013).
In short, these are five (5) conflict resolution techniques that should be mastered by a competent project manager. The value of the conflict created is actually determined by the project manager’s ability to foster constructive conflict while reducing its potential harmful implications. If the project manager does not manage the conflicts effectively, it will further lead to mistrust, frustration, cynicism, apathy, hostile relationships, anxiety, and poor project performance (Sudhakar, 2015). A project manager with conflict resolution skills is undoubtedly able to identify when will the conflict be desirable to the project, what type of conflict would be beneficial to the project, and how much conflict is healthy for the project environment.