Conflicts in Team "MUST"

We experienced conflicts during the two group assignments. Fortunately, instead of bringing about negative outcomes, the conflicts had inspired more creativity and turned into improvements for our work. According to the conflict nature, we classify the conflicts into three levels: behavior, personality, and ideology. We are going to discuss the three types of conflicts in our individual projects. Here we would like to give brief introduction to what the conflicts are and how we resolve those conflicts.

             

Conflicts of Behaviors
It is so natural that every single person has unique behavioral mindset of his/her own and it will lead to different set of behaviors as ultimate output. When three individuals had been put into a team by randomly selection of professor, we have no idea of the behavioral style of each other.

After a period of time for us getting know one another, we realized that there were some differences on behavioral mindset among three of us which had led to some problems by which would cause potential conflicts possibly. One member always was late for class even was absent for several times because she is a mother-student who has the obligation taking care of her baby, while other thought there is no excuse for you to absent from class despite you have to take care of your family member. Although both two members had negative emotions toward each other when we held meeting discussing the team assignments, it didn’t evolve into a conflict at last for we had reached a consensus that every member in the team should make compromise to each other and commit to the common goal as well. Firstly, we chose to hold an open talk about the dissatisfaction among team members at a proper time, and this kind of sincerity lay the foundation in solving the problem. Secondly, we basically use the approach of persuasion instead of criticism to make the whole process more friendly and acceptable.

 

 

Conflicts of Personalities
Members in our team have different personality. When discussing how to get started to work on the group assignment, we often had different opinions. One believed that we should have a well-structured action plan, while other thought we shouldn't spend so much time on planning but to concentrate on the actual work to be done. None of them were willing to accept the others' ways of doing things. Obviously, one member was process-oriented and the other was outcome-oriented. Regarding the conflict arose by the difference in personality and working styles, we will conduct an analysis on how our team has used the problem-solving and persuasion skills to help us in solving the conflict. How we could achieve a win-win situation where members were willing to cooperate in achieving the group goal and at the same time, maintain the working relationship. In particular, we will explain the strategy we used in guiding our group to be more reflective and respective. At individual level, how one should be more mindful to personality difference and able to effectively communicate his/her reasoning. Once people are being more reflective, at group level, how the team can develop a collaborative environment to build trust within team members.


Conflicts of Ideologies

Due to different backgrounds, members in our team have different ideologies from each other. The conflict occurred when we were discussing how to develop recommendations or conclusions to one assignment. One thought that we should fully analyze what happened in the case we selected before arriving at conclusions, while another member believed that we should assume some conclusions first, and then search for facts and theories to justify the assumptions. The first method relies on research results to develop conclusions, which is more scientifically rigid. However, the second method sounds more efficient.

The conflict stuck the project proceedings that we cannot reach a consensus on working methods which determine the work plan and milestones. How did we solve the conflict? Firstly, we identified the source of the conflict was because of different ideologies, and the conflict cannot be overlooked for it had severe impact on the works thereafter. Secondly, we had to choose a strategy to resolve the conflict. For the interest of the team as a whole, we needed to evaluate each method to find out the most suitable method to work out our project. We applied the combination of strategies “Compromising” and “Problem Solving”. “Problem Solving” focuses on evaluation of varying points of view to defeat the problem and not each other. On the other hand, the strategy “Compromising” made team members to reach an agreement to maximize the group interest without hurting each other.