Conflicts often happen in our everyday life. It can happen
due to fear, sense of fairness, attitudes, needs and different viewpoints.
Conflicts are definitely no stranger to us. Now, allow me to use a hypothetical
situation of a certain interpersonal conflict situation.
A group of three
teens were put in the same group to work on a project that requires them to
build a website and to make a presentation on how they came about with making
the website. The three teens were called Sally, John and Tim. They discussed
about the project and decided that the most time saving way was to split the
job among the three of them. Sally then asked, “What do each of you want to do?
I’m going to be the website designer.” There was a period of silence as Tim and
John pondered. Tim finally spoke up, “I think I would do the presentation
slides and since John is better in coding, we shall leave the coding to John.”
Sally nodded her head in agreement but however, the expression on John’s face
did not show that he was happy with the agreement. John’s face was contorted in
anger and shouted angrily “Why do I have to do all the coding while all of you
get the easy work?” Tim was utterly displeased with what John was saying. “Who
ever said doing presentation slides is easy? On the contrary, coding is way
easier!” Was what Tim thought to himself. “Coding is so easy to do! How can you
say such things when you are the one who actually got the easy work?” Tim
retorted back with his voice raised. “Then why don’t I see you doing the coding
then?” John said in a challenging manner. This led to both John and Tim arguing
about who would be doing the coding and who would be doing the presentation slides.
From the above situation, it could be seen that John and Tim utilized fight to resolve the conflict. John was allocated to do the coding as
he is better compared to the other 2. However, it is possible that John actually
wanted Tim to do the coding with him as it is better to have two heads thinking
than one. The conflict could have been contained if John used collaboration and
pointed out his displeasure in a different tone, like “I feel that the coding
for the project would prove to be difficult. Could Sally or Tim share the
workload with me?”
Being in a conflict, one would want to emerge victorious.
However, the key to conflicts are not a matter of who wins and lose. It’s about
how to resolve it. Should a situation alike to this arise, how would you manage
it?
