Structural Causes of Conflict

Most of my e-zines focus on how to leverage interpersonal skills to be more successful at the difficult business of communicating. While almost all of us can benefit from this, it is not true that if people just had more skill conflict would go away. A significant contributor to conflict in organizations, that has very little to do with interpersonal skills, are structural or cultural issues. If these are contributing to the conflict in your organizations, the conflict will not be resolved by skills training. What can help are organizational development interventions designed to address the root causes of the conflict. Cheshire Mediation has the expertise to design interventions to address some of the following types of structural conflicts:

1. Unclear or overlapping roles or responsibilities
2. A lack of leadership combined with unclear processes for how the group can do the work without a leader
3. Transitions and change
4. Conflicting values and motives (for example valuing control vs. relationship building in a residential care facility)
5. Outside environmental forces which create tension and uncertainty
6. Cultural expectations and assumptions (for example expected work load, we don’t start meetings until the boss is here, we don’t address issues directly, if workers are not closely supervised they will not work hard)
7. How communication flows through an organization – who talks to who when there are problems
8. Different levels of investment (for example volunteer boards working on projects with paid staff)
9. A lack of trust among staff.

If your organization is experiencing conflict due to any of these types of cultural or structural issues, training is not the answer. If you are interested in exploring what other types of interventions might help, give us a call at 603-357-6873.

(c) 2005 Cheshire Mediation. All rights reserved. You are free to use material from the Conflict Management Monday eZine in whole or part as long as you include complete attribution, including live web site link and e-mail link. Please notify Cheshire Mediation when and where the material will appear.

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