BUSINESS OF CHANGE AND CONFLICT

ENGLISH 93

SUMMARY CHAPTER 14, THE BUSINESS OF CHANGE AND CONFLIT

This chapter teaches us how to manage change in the organization. Organizational change means modify the way the company conducts business and performs work tasks, which means breakdown of business as usual. Changes are peoples who facilitate the coordination of change an effort. The mains reasons organization changes are: competition, changing consumer demands, globalization, and change of management. When change happens, employees often become confused and insecure. Employees experience great distress when they perceive a communication vacuums. A communication vacuums happens when information about the change is not shared with employees. The result is often flurry of rumors on the company grapevine, growing anxiety, and even resistance. Resistance means that employees of various ranks may ignore or attempt to block the change effort. Resistance is justified by factor like fear, interruption of routine, loss of faith, trust, and personal investment, feeling that past efforts are meaningless. Change communication can reduce resistance through multidirectional message and multimedia communication.

A natural outgrowth of change is conflict. Conflict is an event expressed through communication when individuals or groups behave in ways that indicate they have incompatible position or goals. Productive and positive aspects of conflict include increased understanding of individual, enhanced innovation, heightened creativity, better ideas, improved relationships, and more useful problem solving. Conflict communication skills include active listening, verbal diplomacy, and interpersonal flexibility. There are four types of conflict: communication conflicts, social view conflicts, fundamental interest conflicts, and business conflicts. Traditional conflict strategies involve negotiation which is a give-and-take technique to achieve accord through a process of compromise or the offering of proposals and counterproposals.

Transformative communication in a conflict focuses on interaction and relationship building by reframing the terms and concepts of conflict.