Personality Conflict and Solution
Sometimes people around us will make complaints like following to us, “That guy keeps talking and talking, and he is really arrogant, I just can’t work with him anymore”, or “I am not happy, I feel much tired to work with my boss. I am not sure if she is just too nervous or because she doesn’t trust me. She keeps nagging around me”. After hearing that, as the stand-by, we would try to persuade people to view things in different way, saying that guy or the boss is just different people from yourself. That’s right, WE, many of us are different. To be more exactly, we are of different personality types, and we are experiencing such conflicts caused by our different personality types. Same the project team experienced!
According to the Big Five Factor Model, there are five dimensions of our personality, including Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, and Extraversion. People with each dominant dimension would behave quite differently. For example, the extravert people would be talkative, social and assertive person, just like the guy being complained by his co-worker in above case; the Neurotic people would be anxious, prone to depression and worries a lot, just like the boss being complained by her subordinate in above case; the Conscientious people would be responsible, orderly and dependable ones, the team member with a few years of working experiences in the case of this paper concerned should fall under this type.
As per group introduction, that team member showed responsibility spirit and organized trait when he took initiative to try to run meetings with efficiency. Unfortunately, he is a conscientious person, none of his teammates in the project team is. It’s hard for us to clarify what personality type the other team members are, but judging from their responses, we could make a guess that none of them is of conscientious type. Another guess is that the one who did give a simple feedback could be more responsive than others. Different behaviour not being accepted by different people, that’s how the conflict between conscientious person and non-conscientious person arose.
The team member created a minutes as format and required all teammates to follow to take in turn, such behaviour of conscientious people could easily be perceived as being a dominator. Conscientious people are likely to set a goal or make a plan, then they hope to execute it strictly so to be highly efficient in work and life. They cannot tolerate any un-planned activities and they dislike surprise. These kinds of behaviours turned out to be burdens to those non-conscientious persons, who obviously prefer to work with much flexibility and freedom. They hate to be bounded by any rules. Their silent protest without giving any response is a good sign for a conflict.
So, how to solve such conflict that caused by the personality differences? We have all known well that our personality is relatively stable traits of ourselves, so it’s hard to change it in short time. While, referring to the main approaches of conflict solving, I think for the one with a few working experiences, if he wants to execute more of his influence, he needs first to do some politicking; For the whole team, if it wants to work more smoothly, then it needs to use problem-solving win-win strategy.
Politicking is not about playing the dirty tricks. It’s about seeking any possible allies within the team. For this case, if to do some planning work could help the team work together more effectively, it should be done then. If such idea was not accepted by all team members, we can start with selling it to one of team member. The member who gave response could be the first potential ally. Then, if possible, to seek the chance to influence one more with the power of the existing allies. Of course, there are many things like trust building, well communication in the process of building allies, of which I would not discuss here, but to be discussed by other members in RGB group.
Yet playing some politicking could only help one stand stably in a team, and avoid being isolated by team totally. It is not enough to help the team to solve the issue completely. The ultimate approach I suggest to use is the problem-solving win-win strategy. That sounds strange since there is no second party in this case. They are all teammates not counterpart parties. I propose to use this way is because I found they showed different objectives for taking this course. The conscientious one may have relatively high expectation, yet non-conscientious ones have low expectations, just like the one from European country stated. So they need to realize that they are actually acting like different parties, they are not a team at all, since they don't have an agreed goal.
To work smoothly and happily, they first need to speak up openly their individual purpose and objective for the project and the course. Then, each needs to consider what he or she could do to support or allow others to achieve purposes. Finally, to discuss and agree on a common goal that could be accepted by each member. Once the whole team stand on the same base, then it's possible for them to work happily together. Otherwise, misunderstanding is easily arising.
We said before that personality was hard to change in short time, yet to solve issues, at this point, we have to force ourselves to make improvements accordingly, so to achieve the settled new team goal. For example, the conscientious one should know how to raise suggestion without impressing non-conscientious ones that he has interests to dominate the project. The non-conscientious ones should learn how to show respects to teammates even when they dislike or not agree their ideas. This is not compromising, but the sincere efforts each member would like to make, aiming at solving the problem based on the win-win objective.
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