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Recipe for Conflict

A minimum of two people and an issue on which they disagree.

Add to the recipe the factors that the people each bring into the relationship:

Values, Culture & Triggers

Our values are what we judge to be important in life: our personal principles.  The rules we live by. They typically originate in our culture but over time our values may shift as our relationship with our culture shifts (e.g. young adults and their elderly parents may share a culture but have very different values as regards to how kids are raised; dealing with garbage; ethnic diversity, and so on).

“Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others.”[1]

Triggers: What sets you off causes a quick change in your mood/attitude, rooted often in values or cultural practices you hold dear would be called a trigger.  For example a South African grandmother whose half-Japanese grandson slurps his tea.  Tea slurping is what one does in Japanese culture.  Not so in ‘polite society’ in South Africa.

Conflict Style & Skill Level

Read More »Conflict Management Starts with Self

Conflict Management Starts with Self

  • 9 min read
Fundamental need for fairness is confounded by our cultural expression of it.

<4230 words>  This is NOT A BLOG. It is a conference paper that I decided to make available via my blog.  The PPT (available on LinkedIn) is on a safari theme, so these giraffes suggest we take the long view of where our need for fairness comes from.

FAIRNESS:

A CULTURAL CONSTRUCT OR A UNIVERSAL HUMAN NEED?

The challenge to HR: 

Improving workplace fairness by stepping back and taking it all in.

Background paper to a presentation given at the Atlantic Universities and Colleges Human Resources Association (AUCHRA) Conference in Sydney, Nova Scotia, Canada, on 22 October, 2015

Presenter/author:  Delphine du Toit.    Mediator/Coach/Facilitator.

Fairness is the default position

1.    INTRODUCTION

Fairness is a baseline requirement for humans, yet it feels like the harder we try the more difficult it is to achieve.  The difficulty with being universally fair is that it is a balancing act.   No-one discusses ‘fairness’, generally speaking, unless someone has alleged that something has been unfair.  The withdrawal of fairness is a bit like the withdrawal of oxygen: you don’t know you have it until it is taken away.

Unfairness – perceived or real – is a great source of conflict in the workplace.  Sometimes it bursts forth in a flurry of accusations; more often it festers in someone’s heart and head, gradually poisoning their feelings about the workplace; being at work; co-workers; management, which then manifests itself in reduction of effort; sloppy work; argumentative responses to requests; squabbling; gossiping; and, in more extreme cases, in absenteeism or overt sabotage.

Read More »Fairness is simple. Bring culture into it and bedevil everything.

Fairness is simple. Bring culture into it and bedevil everything.

  • 22 min read