Mini Case: Out of the Box Leadership At the request of your superintendent, you are working on designing and leading a school restructuring with
Mini Case: Out of the Box Leadership
At the request of your superintendent, you are working on designing and leading a school restructuring with a brand-new model of schooling for children ages 5–12. As you think ahead, you are aware that conflict is going to be present throughout the process of implementing this new model of schooling.
Write a 250- to 300-word response to the following:
· Using Figures 11.1 and 11.2 from Ch. 11 of Organizational Behavior in Education, discuss the importance of school culture and conflict.
· Identify strategies you will use to mitigate conflict.
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rganization.
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Effects of Organizational Conflict
This is an important issue because frequent and powerful hostility arising from conflict can have a devastating impact on the behavior of people in organizations. Psychological withdrawal from the hostility—such as alienation, apathy, and indifference—is a common symptom that keenly affects the functioning of the organization. Physical withdrawal—such as absence, tardiness, and turnover—is a widely occurring response to conflict in schools. Physical withdrawal is often written off as laziness on the part of teachers who have been spoiled by soft administrative practices. Outright hostile or aggressive behaviors—including job actions, property damage, and minor theft of property—are teacher responses to conflict situations that appear to be too difficult to handle or totally frustrating.
Indeed, the behavioral consequences of conflict in educational organizations can be, to put it mildly, undesirable. Ineffective management of conflict (for example, a hard-nosed policy of punishment for offenses, get-tough practices in the name of administering the negotiated contract, emphasizing the adversarial relationship between teachers and administrators) can—and frequently does—create a climate that exacerbates the situation and is likely to develop a
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FIGURE 11.1 An ineffective conflict-response-climate syndrome leads to a lower state of organizational health.
downward spiral of mounting frustration, deteriorating organizational climate, and increasing destructiveness, as shown in Figure 11.1 .
Obviously, the health of an organization caught in this syndrome tends to decline. Effective management of conflict, on the other hand, can lead to outcomes that are productive and enhance the health of the organization over time, as shown in Figure 11.2 . The point to be emphasized is that
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conflict in itself is neither good nor bad; it is (in value terms) neutral. Its impact on the organization and the behavior of people largely depends on the way conflict is treated.
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The Criterion: Organizational Performance
To speak of organizational conflict as good or bad, or as functional or dysfunctional, requires one to specify the criteria used in judging. Some people—many with a humanistic bias—simply find conflict repugnant and seek to abolish it wherever it may be found. Others are concerned about the internal stress that conflict often imposes on individuals. These problems, in themselves, are not of central concern in organizational terms. After all, there are also people who relish conflict, find it zestful, and seek it out. The issue, then, is the impact of conflict on the performance capability of the organization as a system.
Again, the problems of measuring the productivity of educational organizations and the discussion of the relevance of the school’s system or school’s internal conditions (that
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FIGURE 11.2 An effective conflict-response-climate syndrome leads to an improved state of organizational health.
is, organizational culture, interaction-influence system) come to the fore. The functional or dysfunctional consequences of conflict on educational organizations are understood best in terms of organizational health, adaptability, and stability.
Modern motivation theory makes it clear that challenge, significance, and the need to solve problems are important attributes of work that people
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find interesting, enjoyable, and motivating. Also, as has been seen, concepts of participative leadership rest on the conviction that many people in the organization have good ideas and high-quality information to contribute to making better decisions in the organization. In this view, Kenneth Thomas (1976) observed that
[t]he confrontation of divergent views often produces ideas of superior quality. Divergent views are apt to be based upon different evidence, different considerations, different insights, different frames of reference. Disagreements may thus confront an individual with factors which he had previously ignored, and help him to arrive at a more comprehensive view which synthesizes elements of his own and others’ positions. (p. 891)
Finally, there is growing reason to believe (based on both research and expert opinion) that conflict causes people to seek effective ways of dealing with it, resulting in improved organizational functioning (for example, cohesiveness, clarified relationships, clearer problem-solving procedures). Speaking of society in general, Deutsch (1973) observed that
conflict within a group frequently helps to revitalize existent norms; or it contributes to the emergence of new norms. In this sense, social conflict is a mechanism for adjustment of norms adequate to new conditions. A flexible society benefits from conflict because such behavior, by helping to create and modify norms, assures its continuance under changed conditions. (p. 9)
He went on to caution that rigid systems that suppress conflict smother a useful warning signal, thereby maximizing the danger of catastrophic breakdown.
We all have witnessed repeatedly the wisdom of these observations in national and international events of great and small magnitude. Educators in the United States also have seen it closer to home, where fearful
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explosions of pent-up hostility have, not infrequently, followed long periods of frustration brought on by organizations that thought they had either crushed or nimbly avoided impending conflict.
Although few who really understand conflict would advocate its deliberate use in organizational life, fewer still would advocate seeking its elimination or avoidance. Rather, by applying concepts of conflict management, organizations can minimize the destructive potential of conflict, on the one hand, and make co
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