Personality Factors and Conflict Management Styles

Question: Discuss about the Personality Factors and Conflict Management Styles. Answer: Introduction: A USA based organization has its branches spread across the world and for a new project which has been taken up for a client, the company had outsourced a part of their work to third party vendors who supplied human resource for managing their MIS systems involving activities like data entry and data analysis. The company has a team in place with 3 people working on roll with the MNC while 3 of the new hires were taken from a Human Resource Consultancy. Harold, who is one of the on-roll employee was facing issues in managing tasks and was overburdened. Thus, the management decided to assign one of the consultancy hire, named Elica to him for managing data related tasks. Harold being a very experienced person in the company has a good hold over its operations and carries a significant amount of knowledge about how things worked. He was very sound with the technology. Elica on the other side is a person with good amount of experience, is creative and can catch hold of concepts fast. However, she has been working as an entrepreneur before joining the organization and was not used to taking orders. Harold was a pure perfectionist and inflexible person who demanded work from Elica on strict deadlines as well as demanded flawless work. He was very dominating and wanted things to get done as per his understanding and to be done real fast. Despite being an adaptable and highly knowledgeable person, conflicts grew between Elica and Harold as Elica could not take Harold's dominating attitude very positively. In addition, she was being tracked by Harold for every minute she spent and soon she found herself overburdened with work and an extreme pressure for the demand of speed. Moreover, Harold would compare her working with his own every time telling her that she was not so efficient as he thought while he took her interview. She was somewhat fearful of having any conflicts as she was new to office so did not speak against anything Harold demanded and kept working as she was asked to. Initially, Elica was very enthusiastic and took every work that came her way as an opportunity to learn and grow in the company but with tension rising between the two colleagues, she became less interested in work and started to avoid taking new work and slowed down in the work she had been given making Harold impatient. This lead one day to a major fight between the two when Harold asked her straight why had she become slow in her work suddenly. He asked her to sit beside him so that he could check out what she was doing wrong. This appeared to be very uncomfortable for Elica and she became impulsive blurting out her feelings all of a sudden. She told that she did not like Harold sitting on her head tracking her every second and that she was not a fresher to be treated like that but had over 8 years of experience working in corporate and in business. She ended up shouting at Harold to which Harold responded with anger. While they were having the fight, the seniors came to understand the situation. The seniors made both the employees speak one by one. While Elica clearly explained her reasons for showing anger, Harold simply said that he couldn't work with such a resources and wanted her out of the team. The other two on-roll and 2 off-role employees remained silent and did not intervene in the situa tion. After the talk was over, seniors were unable to decide who was right and thus, they told Elica to temporarily work with other off-role employee named Arvind. While she was working on the same things and reporting to same person that is Harold, she was stopped from talking to him directly and every time she needed any support, she would reach out to Arvind. However, because of the work requirements, she often needed information or talk to Harold which she did considering practical side and Harold also gave her whatever information was required but the conflicts remained between them and they could not stand each other. Whenever Elica needed Harold's inputs, she would first approach others in the team including Arvind and only when she had no choice but to talk to Harold, did she approach him directly. On the other side, if Harold wanted something to be done by Elica, he would send an email to Arvind asking him to help get the work done from Elica. Both Elica and Harold were professionally dedicated to work and everything was happening as per schedule but there was no or rate direct communication between them. The team knew the situation well but never was any initiative taken to resolve the conflict permanently. They just decide to keep avoiding conflicts and let the things move as they were. When the whole team used to meet, the conflict between the two came out in the form of blames and resistances but the two in conflict never spoke to each other directly during meeting. There was an environment of tension and pressure in every meeting in which the two participated as team could not expect any help or cooperation from the two. Both colleagues appeared to be quite inflexible to bend their conscience, be diplomatic to improve situation. Both were somewhat emotional and straightforward people who could not be manipulative but only expressed themselves in front of the team. Analysis Key People Name: Harold General Facts: He is a young 32 years old Senior Executive of the MIS department of the MNC organization employed on the roll of company and has been working for the company for over two years since the start of the new client project. Among all the MIS team members in the current location, Harold is the oldest and most knowledgeable employee of the company.He is a very competitive person who keeps comparing himself with others often and tries hard to remain ahead always in his field of work. He works very fast and is a perfectionist who seeks perfection even in others working for him. He has a habit of monitoring work of juniors very closely always keeping control over the activities. Personal Characteristics: Impatient, Clever, Impulsive, perfectionist, inflexible, professionally dedicated, knowledgeable, dominating Name:Elica General Facts: She is a young 33 years old Senior Executive of the MIS department of the MNC organization recently employed on the contract of the company for assisting Harold in the new client project. She has been employed by Harold but got the opportunity through a friend works in the same office with the human resource outsourcing organization that Elica is on roll of.Elica is a single mother and has a small son who is been taken care of by a maid at her back in her house and she also has a support from her mother who stays with her. Elica is a very social person and believes in team work and encouragement of juniors. Personal Characteristics: Opportunistic, adaptable, knowledgeable, analytical, professionally dedicated The context:An MNC company which is into telecommunication infrastructure has taken up a big project from another company for which it needed to hire people for different operations out of which MIS was one department that took people from all over the country. In one location in a metro city, MIS department of the project had 5 employees working on-role including MIS Head, Assistant Manager, 3 on-role senior executives, 2 off-role senior executives and one off-role executive. The company used their on-roll employees to guide project and hired others on contract with human resource consultancies for managing the ground work. The on-role employees were to take decisions on tasks to be completed every day and the same were done in part by them while a major portion was to be delegated to outsourced employees. The responsibilities given to on-contract employees were assigned by on-role employees. Both the members of the project stood at the same level in designation but because of the p roject arrangement, the position of on-role employees was higher in understanding and thus, off-role employees reported to them. The new employee who was on-contract , Elica joined the organization and was made to report to Harold who was an on-role employees. Both employees have same years of experience but Harold had more experience of telecom domain while Elica has been into several IT organizations after which she worked as a business consultant for entrepreneurs. Key Event:When Elica was made to report to Harold, their working styles did not match and they had personality differences that caused conflicts between them. While Harold was very dominating, Elica was not used to handling domination from seniors as she has been an entrepreneur for a long time before joining the company. Elica understood her responsibilities and took ownership of the same but at the same time, Harold has been treating her like a typical employee who may not be serious about and thus, tried keeping a very close control over her by monitoring her every minute. This upset Elica but she did not speak for long as she did not want to get into any conflicts at the start of her job. However, as she did not resist, the behaviour of Harold became extremely commanding and Elica was unable to control her discomfort. The result was that Elica found herself always stressed at work which also affected her personal life as she would take more time to finish her work and went home l ate. When Harold charged on her one day asking her explanations for taking more time than expected to finish her work, she responded back with anger, telling Harold that she was not supposed to be treated like a fresher. The key reason for this conflict could be due to personality differences between Harold who was competitive and Elica who was cooperative. While Harold believed in keeping close monitoring and comparing work of one employee with other to remain competitive, Elica was more of a social person who believes in building teams by bringing them together and working with team spirit. The work however, demanded more of a controlled and competitive approach at the stage as per Harold which is why he was being monitoring Elica closely without having any considerations of how she felt about his behaviour or if his style of work affected her performance in positive or negative ways4. The conflict was only discussed once but was largely ignored by seniors who preferred to just avoid the situation by keeping the two employees separated as much as possible without taking any corrective measures and thus, the conflict largely remained unresolved. 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