Handling Conflict and The Nature of Leadership

5 Basic Behaviors to Help You Better Handle Conflict

• openness: state your views openly and honestly
• equality: treat others’ status and ideas as equal to yours
• empathy: try to experience the other person’s feelings and point of view
• supportiveness: let the other person know you want to find a resolution that will benefit you both
• positiveness: be positive about the other person and your relationship

5 Conflict-Handling Styles

• avoiding: ignoring or suppressing a conflict
  • “Maybe the problem will go away.”
• obliging: allows the desires of the other party to prevail
  • “Let’s do it your way.”
• dominating: ordering an outcome, using formal authority and power to resolve a conflict
  • “You have to do it my way.”
• compromising: both parties give up something to gain something
  • “Let’s split the difference.”
• integrating: managers strive to confront the issue and cooperatively identify the problem and seek a solution
  • “Let’s reach a win-win solution that benefits both of us.”

The Nature of Leadership

• leadership: the ability to influence employees to voluntarily pursue organizational goals
• leadership coaching: enhancing a person’s abilities and skills to lead
• managerial leadership: process of influencing others to understand and agree what needs to be done and the process of facilitating individual and collective efforts to accomplish shared objectives

Power and Influence

• power: the ability to marshal human, informational, and other resources to get something done
  • the extent to which a person is able to influence others so they respond to orders
• personalized power: power directed at helping oneself
• socialized power: power directed at helping others

6 Sources of Power

1. legitimate power: results from managers’ formal positions within the organization
2. reward power: results from managers’ authority to reward their subordinates
3. coercive power: results from managers’ authority to punish their subordinates
4. expert power: results from ones specialized expertise
5. referent power: derived from one’s personal attraction (strong, visionary leadership)
6. informational power: derived from the logical and valuable information one communicates

Common Influence Tactics

• soft tactics:
  • rational persuasion
  • consultation
  • inspirational appeals
  • ingratiating tactics
  • personal appeals
• hard tactics:
  • exchange tactics
  • coalition tactics
  • pressure tactics
  • legitimating tactics

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