Workplace Conflict Resolution Essentials For Dummies, Australian and New Zealand Edition

Chapter 2

Understanding What People Bring to Conflict

In This Chapter

Reviewing communication

Understanding the individual’s perspective

Shedding light on emotions

Addressing common responses to conflict

Each person in your workplace is a complex system of past experiences, beliefs, values, opinions and emotions. Each has different ways of communicating, processing the things around him or her, and handling conflict.

This chapter helps you gain a better insight into the people on your team — why they see things the way they do, why they react to different people in different ways, and how their emotions can complicate the whole situation. You can start to understand how your colleagues’ personal beliefs and attributes contribute to the team dynamic and sometimes contribute to conflict (which is normal, natural and inevitable, by the way) so that you can build better working relationships and a more productive working environment. You’ll see the broader foundation of conflict and be more prepared to proactively reduce and perhaps prevent it.

Rediscovering Communication

Good communication ...