Harnessing Conflict to Become More Productive and Profitable

There are myriad reasons for why people leave one job for another. Some research offers things like low pay, lack of growth opportunities, uncertain future, working conditions, and low morale for reasons why people quit. And those are certainly reasonable justifications.

What if it was something else?

Another reason comes from Bruce Tuckman, a psychological researcher in the 1960s and professor at The Ohio State University, who published a theory that led to the creation of what is now known as the Four Stages of Group Development: Forming, Storming, Norming, and Performing.

All groups go through these stages, he argued. No matter what.

As groups form, either an entirely new group of people or an existing group simply adding a new person to the team, they come together with excitement about their mission and goals, anticipation for what they can accomplish, optimism about what the future holds, and perhaps even some anxiety about all of the above. Generally, people are good natured, cordial, and caring. It’s just like meeting someone new. You keep things surface-level and pleasant.

Conflict breaks out

Eventually, these pleasantries go away, usually because something happens: conflict. This is what Tuckman called Storming. Much of the time, it is simply because two people disagree on the way ahead, and whenever two people disagree, you have conflict. And when this happens, according to Tuckman, reality sets in and people realize that things are not going to be as easy as they thought. Frustration and dissatisfaction grow, and team members develop “adjustment anxiety,” an uncertainty over the recognition that things are not going to be smooth and cordial as they initially thought.

If conflict is bad enough, people can disengage or perhaps even quit. When people quit, you hire new people to replace them, and you reenter the Forming stage. Then you Storm, and people quit again, and you enter a vicious cycle of turnover that is seemingly unending.

Breaking the cycle

What if you could break the cycle? After all, doing so would lead to your group entering the Norming phase of group dynamics, the place where the team develops a shared set of goals, becomes more cohesive, accepts that conflict is inevitable, and establishes coping mechanisms for when it does happen. If you can do that, you can become a high-performing team, one that is highly functioning, every person is leading the team from their area of responsibility and making their unique contributions. That’s high performance: teamwork, cohesiveness, leadership, performance, happier teammates, quality, efficiency, timeliness. The combination of those surely leads to profitability.

Learning your conflict management style

Psychologists Ken Thomas and Ralph Kilmann were researchers focused on conflict, and they teamed up in the 1970s to conduct a series of experiments on conflict in the workplace. They determined that there were five different styles that people displayed when dealing with conflict, and these styles were based on two primary dimensions: assertiveness, which is how much you push your perspective on others, and cooperativeness, which is how willing you are to put others interests first. You could be high or low in one, both, or neither, and they also suggested you could be somewhat in the middle of both, as well:

High assertiveness, low cooperativeness: Competing

Low assertiveness, low cooperativeness: Avoiding

Low assertiveness, high cooperativeness: Accommodating

High assertiveness, high cooperativeness: Collaborating

In the middle on both: Compromising

You can read much more on each style through a variety of resources that Thomas and Kilmann published. But the graph above should give you the gist of the five styles.

Different conflicts, different styles

Neither style is “good” or “bad,” rather each can and should be used at different times, depending on the situation. For example, the Competing style should be used when quick, decisive action is vital, Collaborating when both sets of concerns are too important to be compromised, Compromising when goals are moderately important but not worth the effort or potential disruption of more assertive modes, Avoiding when issues are trivial or other issues are more pressing, and Accommodating when you want to show you’re reasonable or want to learn from others…or that you’re wrong!

The purpose, Thomas and Kilmann write, is to know your tendencies and use the appropriate style depending on the situation. Your style doesn’t control you, rather you control your style, and when you recognize that, you increase your self-awareness, develop a stronger ability to self-regulate and control your actions. When that happens, you have a better chance of doing the right thing at the right time based on the person it’s happening with. In short, you’re saving important relationships because you know how to deal with conflict. Yes, you have tendencies and preferences (which you can learn from taking the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Management Instrument), but you can control them and use them to your advantage.

Then, if you can control your actions and choose the right way to deal with conflict, you decrease the likelihood that conflict breaks the team. Instead, you work through conflict in an intentional, purposeful manner. You recognize that it is inevitable, but that good can come of it. That might be one way to reduce turnover, and a good way to have a strong, cohesive team, where everyone is leading from where they are and performing with quality, efficiency, and timeliness. And that sounds like a recipe for profitability.