Exam 11: Conflict and Negotiation in the Workplace

One approach to building trust in negotiations is to discover common backgrounds and interests.

NewTel is a telephone company with a policy of filling positions through promotions rather than hiring from outside. Until recently, the company had a strong engineering focus and tended to promote people into senior executive positions from the engineering areas. Consequently, almost all of the company's 14 senior executives joined the company over 20 years ago in junior engineering positions. There is increasing pressure on NewTel to become more marketing and service oriented, so four people were hired one year ago from consumer products and retail firms to fill new senior executive positions in marketing and service management. The external hires were necessary because employees were not sufficiently qualified. Now there are signs of tension among senior executives, particularly during budget deliberations where there is limited discretionary spending on new corporate activities. The four new hires have been frustrated in their attempts to have the company put more money into marketing and customer services instead of technology investment. Explain why conflict has occurred among senior executives at NewTel.

The two types of negotiations are

Task conflict is more likely to escalate into relationship conflict among employees in highly cohesive teams.

The problem-solving conflict management style involves a high degree of assertiveness and cooperativeness.

Emotional intelligence and team cohesiveness are two ways to

The conflict escalation cycle

Task conflict exists:

Relationship conflict usually causes people to

Which of the following sources of conflict is typically associated with mergers and acquisitions?

Employees at a specialty steel company are divided into the 'hot end' and the 'cold end' of the production process. The hot end forms the steel rods that make their way down the line to the cold end, where they are packed for shipment to clients. Employees at the cold end are primarily responsible for quality control because they are the last ones to see the product before it leaves the plant. Their performance is measured by an index of customer complaints and returns, so they are motivated to reject any rods that don't meet quality standards. But employees at the hot end of the production line earn bonuses based on their output and rejection rate. The fewer rods rejected by employees at the cold end, the fatter the bonuses of employees at the hot end. This creates conflict between the hot-end and cold-end employees. Hot-end employees complain that their cold-end colleagues are too fussy about product quality. Cold-end employees don't like the hot-end employees questioning their quality control decisions. Discuss the source(s) of conflict in this situation and recommend a solution to this conflict.

The six main conditions that cause conflict in organizational settings are incompatible goals, differentiation, interdependence, scarce resources, ambiguous rules, and communication problems.

A person's preferred conflict management style tends to depend partly on that individual's cultural values.

All of the following are considered benefits of moderate conflict in organizations,EXCEPT:

We negotiate whenever we cannot achieve our objectives single-handedly.

Managers tend to rely most often on which of the following types of third-party intervention?

Which of the following interpersonal conflict management styles has some degree of win-lose orientation?

Increasing inventories between sequential work units tends to reduce potential conflict by:

NewTel is a telephone company with a policy of filling positions through promotions rather than hiring from outside. Until recently, the company had a strong engineering focus and tended to promote people into senior executive positions from the engineering areas. Consequently, almost all of the company's 14 senior executives joined the company over 20 years ago in junior engineering positions. There is increasing pressure on NewTel to become more marketing and service oriented, so four people were hired one year ago from consumer products and retail firms to fill new senior executive positions in marketing and service management. The external hires were necessary because employees were not sufficiently qualified. Now there are signs of tension among senior executives, particularly during budget deliberations where there is limited discretionary spending on new corporate activities. The four new hires have been frustrated in their attempts to have the company put more money into marketing and customer services instead of technology investment. What conflict management strategies could be applied at NewTel to minimize dysfunctional conflict among these senior executives?

Most people can avoid experiencing relationship conflict if they focus on constructive debate instead.