Performance Management and Managing Team Conflict sample essay

Performance plan is essential for any organization, no matter how small it is. Self-directed work team is a small organization as well. There are roles, personal and common responsibilities in the team and plan is highly important for good performance of this organization. Effective work of the team also requires smooth collaboration of all team members. To provide effective collaboration team leader needs to use certain schemes in order to avoid or solve conflicts within the team.

The two sources that I will use will provide me with information helpful in the topic discussion. So the first topic for discussion is team performance management. Team usually works on a project where each team member has its own role and responsibility, has to meet certain deadlines and complete the project on time in coordination with other team members. Definition of project management provided by DeJanasz, Dowd and Schneider says that project management involves “coordination of your work and that of others such that organizational objectives can be achieved while meeting time, budget, and quality standards or expectations” (2001).

From this definition we see that performance management is closely tied with planning, which is done in order to meet requirements with resources available. Therefore as the old saying goes “Plan the work. Work the plan.”

a. Defining project objectives is what you do first of all. This means defining what the team needs to accomplish in the time given. Objectives need to be correlated with the work of the whole organization. It is also motivating to think about objectives over the required minimum and assign awards to the team in that case.

b. Determine project members. Knowing what needs to be done you need to select project members and assign roles and tasks to each of them. It is important to check if the individuals are going to be comfortable with their roles and cooperation with others. If the team members have not worked together before and are new to the organization it is helpful to pass certain psychological tests for most effective team assembling.

c. Develop a timeline. Timeline is highly important in any project. Each team member needs to know its deadlines and those need to be carefully matched with deadlines of other team members. It is good to make team timetable visible for everybody and also distribute timetables with individual tasks to each member. Employees need to be trained not to wait for the last moment. Although timetable needs to be solid it also needs to be flexible - there needs to be time planned for something unexpected.

d. Establish checkpoints. In order to control the flow of the project there need to be dates planned when project status will be checked, problems found – solved and plan updated if necessary.

e. Identify and obtain resources. Before the project is started project managers and team members need to identify and receive resources needed for the project. Resources include time, budget, equipment, information, etc.

f. Determine project measurement standards. Measurement standards need to be defined ahead of time in order to control the quality of the product during its realization and be sure that you have met the objectives when the project is complete.

g. Develop a communication system. Communication is essential for smooth and effective cooperation among team members. There needs to be a standard scheme of how information flows within the team, how assignments and feedback are delivered.

h. Debrief and evaluate project performance. In order to improve performance in future at the end of the project work team members need meet and share lessons they learned from this team project work.

Now the second item concerns management of conflicts in the team. There cannot be any effective work if team members are not comfortable working together or even worse if there are some tensions or conflicts that have not been prevented or not dealt with on time. This can prevent team from completing the project on time, producing a high quality project or can result in cease of the project.

Shelia Porter provides us with some helpful guidance on the issue. Best of all is to prevent conflicts. However, if this is too late and a conflict already exists, the first step is to understand the roots of the conflict and then act according to one of the approaches described below.

a. Avoidance. This method is effective only in some cases when reason of the conflict is not essential for the work and is based on emotions. In that case it is logical to not get deeper into the conflict and just redirect people’s thoughts the other way.

b. Accommodation. This method means that one side in the conflict agrees to accept opinion of the other in order to maintain harmony and enable further work together. This approach is acceptable when giving up own opinion is not vital neither for the person nor for the business.

c. Competition. This approach can be best described as win or loose method. It is appropriate when one of the sides or both are absolutely sure that they are right. In this case the sides are given the opportunity to prove their correctness in an open discussion or in a competition. It is good to set a solid measure of when one or the other side wins, so that further arguments on the topic cannot arise.

d. Compromise. This approach means that each side gives up something in order to reach consensus. It is good when the team is running out of time and needs a fast solution, which would both sides agree to and which would enable the team to work further. This method is often used and is found effective although in this case both sides are satisfied only to a certain extent. However the most important is the result of the whole project.

e. Collaboration. This method means that the arguing sides work together on the problem in order to define why the problem occurred and what the best way to solve it is. Each member speaks up its opinion and they all look for the optimal way to the issue of dispute. This is a good method however it is often inappropriate due to lack of time.

These are the five methods to solve conflicts, however as I have said the best way is to prevent conflict in the first place. This is a part of good planning or performance management which we have spoken about in the first part.

Bibliography

1. DeJanasz, Dowd and Schneider. (2001). “Interpersonal Skills in Organizations,” Project Management. The McGraw?Hill Companies: 349-68.

2. Porter, S. (2003). Managing Conflict in Learning Teams. University of Phoenix: 1-8.
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