Part 1: RECALL
When working in an organization setting or in a group, it is obvious that organization-related challenges are likely to occur. This happen to our team when we were trying to decide on the topic to work on for the group assessment. At first, we had all agreed on doing gender discrimination and we did lots of research on it. However, when Hamid came to check our process, he pointed out that gender discrimination is too general to do, therefore, we had to narrow it down and this is when the conflict started. As there are many kinds of gender discrimination, and everyone did research on a different topic, some did on the gender pay gap, some did on sexual harassment and some did on promotion opportunities. No one wanted to give up on the topic they decided for the first time, because they already contributed a lot to it. In this reflection, I am going to use available literature and concept on group conflict to explain, evaluate, and reflect on the conflict that my team experienced.
Part 2: REDUX
As explained above, the major challenge I experienced in our group was a conflict that arises due to member disagreement on which topic our group should focus on. as noted by Mitchell (2016) conflicts within a group or team is usually caused by one or more of the following factors, ambiguity, group identification, interdependence, cultures, and scarcity of resources. In our group, the conflict we experienced arises mainly due to two factors, cultural diversity and interdependence. To some extent, the conflict in our group arose due to the cultural diversity in our group. Our group membership was diverse especially in term of culture and hence different values from those of each other’s. as a result of differences in values, there are those group members who preferred the group to focus on sexual harassment as the main topic of the group while there is another group of members who placed a lot of value on equal employment and hence preferred the group to focus on promotion opportunities as the main topic of the group. This experience is in line with the finding of the study conducted by Chuang & church (2004) and Mitchell (2016) found out that social and cultural diversity in a team leads to differing values, styles, preferences, and priority which creates conflicts among group's members. For instance, the study by Koyuncu & Chipindu (2019) noted that group members who hailed from collectivism cultures placed more value on interpersonal relationship while those that hailed from individual culture placed more value and preferred tasks oriented approach to achieving the group objectives. Such a difference in preferences and priorities created conflicts in a team with diverse members as such a team usually struggles to agree on the right approach to achieve its common objectives. Our group experience is also similar to the finding of the study conducted by Jehn and Greer (2013). In their study, Jehn and Greer (2013) found out that group that had cultural diversity always experience some conflicts which either arise due to miscommunication or due to conflicts of values. However, the conflict caused by diversity in a group is not usually a negative thing. As noted by Puck, Neyer & Dennerlein (2011), some of the conflict in groups with diversity arises due to differences in values, perspective, preferred, approaches, and so on, and as such, they are most likely to be task-oriented rather than relationship-oriented. However, this does not necessarily mean that cultural diversity cannot lead to relationship-based conflict. It has always done so. In our group, the conflicts did not arise due to any personal differences between members but due to differing values, preferences, and priorities as far as choosing the topic is concerned. they are those who believed that sexual harassment was a more pressing issue in society and hence should be given priority while there are those members of the group who believe that equal opportunities especially at promoting employees in the workplace was more important and should be given priority. It can therefore be said that the conflicts in our group were more task-oriented rather than relationship-oriented.