Ch. 14 The Business Of Change and Conflict

This chapter is about change, from the business perspective, and the conflicts that may come from it within an organization and how to deal with them. Change in the business world can mean a lot of different things. A company might change what it sells or how they manufacture it or procedures and services. Of course these big decisions are made by the CEO and high level managers and it is their job to facilitate the change down the ladder. Why do organizations change? It might be because of competition, corporate mergers or acquisitions, globalization, technology and changing consumer demands. Change is always accompanied with fear and apprehension, even in the business world. This fear and not knowing what is going on can lead to resistance by employees to the changes the company wants to enact. If the employees believe they are not receiving enough information about what is going on, there is a communication vacuum which only adds more resistance. Resistance can be reduced and or eliminated through change communication. This is sending many messages in a multidirectional and multimedia way. Multidirectional means the message goes up and down the hierarchy to all employees and multimedia communication is sending messages through different transits. Resistance will also be reduced if your messages clearly state the reasons for the changes and a vision for the future through well times messages. Now not everyone may want to go along with the change. This can lead to conflicts. But there doesn’t need to be a massive company wide change to lead to conflicts in the workplace. They can happen anytime due to pressures and the fact that people have different views and backgrounds. There a few skills to have to deal with conflicts more effectively. One of them is to be an active listener. Another is having the ability to be diplomatic in verbal style, tone and wording. Having a flexible interpersonal style can also help in conflict situations. This allows you to communicate appropriately with different individuals and increases message fidelity. The chapter teaches us a specific way of resolving conflicts and this technique is called dialogue transformation. This is a relationship-dialogue process that may help in conflict situations. It consists of three parts. The first part is exploring interests and emotions. This is listening actively, avoiding interrupting and focusing on the problem and not the other party. The next part is reframing and replacing expectations. This is where the parties discuss points of disagreement, develop a wide range of options, and brainstorm for different words and terms. The final part is converting and resolving. This is focusing on common ground, narrowing issues down and reframing them, and collaborating to develop solutions using the new words and terms. I’ve been in the situation where the company I worked for was in the process of merging with another company and the higher ups did not do a good job of communicating which lead to a communication vacuum. Everyone was confused and not sure about what the changes meant for us. Morale went down and work performance went down because of that. Companies would do themselves a favor by having a better communication system set up for situations like that because in the end, they are the ones who have the most to lose.