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Management Practices and Organisational Behaviour

Notes 4. Functional Interdependence: Conflicts between an organisation's functional units, such as
sales, accounting and manufacturing are commonplace. The sales department is at odds
with manufacturing because quality is too low or prices are too high to meet the
competition. Although departments are separated on the basis of function, they can never
function as completely autonomous units. They must somehow resist the constant urge to
view the organisation in terms of their narrow self-interests.
5. Personality Clashes: Individual differences in such personal qualities as values, attitudes,
abilities and personality traits are often the cause of conflict. Two managers may learn to
despise each other thoroughly for reasons totally unrelated to their work, but their
performance on the job may suffer because of it.
6. Disagreement Over Goals: Conflict among managers is often caused by the fact that there
is poor agreement over goals. Perhaps an even more common source of conflict is the
clash of the personal goals of managers and employees with the goals of the organisation.
7. Bottlenecks in the Flow of Work: Line supervisors in manufacturing must meet production
deadlines, but they are dependent upon production schedules, warehousing shipping, and
others for effective performance. A bottleneck at any point can prevent the line supervisors
from being effective and is quite naturally an occasion for interpersonal conflict.

14.3 Levels of Conflict or Forms of Conflict

We can analyze the effects of conflicts from many different perspectives. They are:
1. Intra-individual or Intrapersonal Conflict: This refers to conflict within an individual
about which work activities to perform. An individual may experience

(a) Cognitive Conflict: An intellectual discomfort created by trying to achieve
incompatible goals.
(b) Affective Conflict: Occurs when competing emotions accompany the incompatible
goals and result in increased stress, decreased productivity or decreased satisfaction
for the individual.
There are several types of intrapersonal conflict, including inter-role, intra-role and person-
role conflicts.
(a) Inter-role Conflict: Occurs when a person experiences conflict among the multiple
roles in his or her life. One inter-role conflict that many employees experience is
work/home conflict, in which their role as worker clashes with their role as spouse
or parent.
(b) Intra-role Conflict: Is conflict within a single role. It often arises when a person receives
conflicting message from role senders (the individuals who place expectations on
the person) about how to perform a certain role.
(c) Person-role Conflict: Occurs when an individual in a particular role is expected to
perform behaviours that clash with his or her values. For example, salespeople may
be officially required to offer the most expensive item in the sales line first to the
customer, even when it is apparent the customer does not want or cannot afford the
item. This may conflict with the salesman's values or past experience, and he may
experience person-role conflict.
Analyzing this type of conflict is difficult because "inner states" of the individual must be
assessed.
2. Inter-individual Conflict: When two individuals disagree about issues, actions, or goals
and where joint outcomes become important, there is inter-individual conflict. Research

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