Week 5

Conflict Avoiding Managers – Employee Confrontation Conflict Avoiding Managers – Employee Confrontation
Yes, an employee must confront his or her manager when conflict is being avoided. It is also equally important to understand why the manager is trying to avoid conflict before confronting. It is believed that a certain degree of conflict is important at the workplace as it leads to better decision making due to expression of different viewpoints. Groupthink can be avoided in the workplace with healthy levels of conflict (Daft & Marcic, 2010).
Also avoiding is sometimes used as a conflict management approach by some managers. Under certain circumstances such as there is no positive outcome of resolving the conflict, it is too trivial, disruption would prove to be very costly, etc mangers tend to use the avoiding style of conflict management (Schyns & Hansbrough, 2010). Hence, it is first important to understand why the manager is avoiding conflict before confronting them.
With the exception of the above two cases, an employee must confront the manager if a conflict is being avoided. It is very important for an employee to trust and believe in his or her manager. It is only when an employee trusts the manger to act in the best interest of the employee that he or she can dedicate completely and work for the manager. In the absence, of this trust an employee will not only lose confidence but also be de-motivated. This will affect both the performance of the employee as well as the overall output of the team.
This attitude of the manager to avoid conflicts can disrupt the dynamics of a group as employees do not feel recognised or rewarded with respect to the work they do in comparison with other employees. This can further escalate the conflicts in a group. Also, the feedback given by a conflict avoiding manager can be very diplomatic and does not serve the purpose of a feedback. Employees need to have a clear understanding of where they stand in the workplace and how they can improve. This cannot be accomplished with a diplomatic feedback. Therefore, it is important that an employee confronts a conflict avoiding manager.
References
Daft, R. L. & Marcic, D. (2010). Understanding Management. OH: Cengage Learning.
Schyns, B. & Hansbrough, T. (2010). When leadership goes wrong: destructive leadership, mistakes, and ethical failures. Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, Inc.