Conflict is a part of life and inevitable when you are working with other people. Hence, man has to devise ways to deal with it, and eventually to turn it to his own advantage. Conflicts generally occur when people have differing views, beliefs and perspectives. Traditionally conflict was avoided, however a contemporary approach is to use conflict as a means to synthesize relationships among employees and create an environment of competition.
Every organization has its way of building relationships among the employees, and it is done through the chain of command or lines of power in an organizational hierarchy.
The organizational hierarchy is very crucial in an organization because it determines the environment, basic conditions and processes of the organization, which could lead to more conflicts or can help reduce and avoid them. The chain of command follows certain rules and procedures, which determine the type of organization and work towards improving its productivity. It essentially promotes motivation among the employees, and is designed to manage conflict between lines of power in the organization.
It devises a standard procedure for managing conflict between employees, employees and their managers, managers and higher command, and organization with external stakeholders such as customers and other businesses.
Structuring the organization helps give a clear focus to everyone in the organization what to expect and how to behave, thus making it easy for the managers to manage conflicts. It creates a conducive environment for feedback, which in turn helps the organization to obtain innovative ideas from the employees, which is essential for survival of the organization in today’s dynamic business world. It also helps in keeping the employees motivated as they feel themselves as part of the organization, hence improving productivity and efficiency of the overall organization.
And lastly, but most importantly, it provides a very clear guideline to all the employees to manage conflicts between them, e.g. if an employee feels threatened by his colleague, he will know that he has to file a written report to his immediate manager. This facilitates resource and time saving, and managers can spend their time to more constructive activities than solving fights between the employees.
However, an inappropriate organization structure can create more conflicts between lines of power. A structure that does not encourage feedback, and requires all the employees to follow the leader unquestionably, might de-motivate the employees. They might feel insulted and may work in ways to deliberately lower the productivity of the organization. The type of hierarchy depends on the nature of business.
Therefore managers have to be very careful when devising the organizational structure, as implementing a wrong chain of command might cause the more conflicts between the lines of power and serve to be misery than a blessing.
