Causes of Workplace Conflicts

Causes of Workplace Conflicts

Understanding how conflicts arise at workplace can enable individuals in anticipating
situations that may eventually snowball into huge crises. While it appears that anything
can trigger off a conflict at the workplace, conflict typically stems from a limited number
of causes – organizational factors and interpersonal factors.

The Organizational Factors include –

• Organizational Change: Organizational change may entail loss of control,
feeling of uncertainty, sense of insecurity and concern about coping with new
job demands. Naturally, resistance to change should not only be anticipated,
but it should be expected. The result is the rise of a conflict.

• Diverse Employee Groups: Conflicts are also common in organizations with
a large number of employees who differ in terms of gender, religion, language,
ethnicity and economic status. They serve as rallying points for people to come
together and form informal cliques. Informal groups are often a breeding source
of conflicts.

• Strategic / operational disagreement: Conflict may occur when there is an
inherent disagreement between an organization’s mission or the objectives and
strategies employed to accomplish that mission. Conflict may also arise when
there is dissonance about the kind of processes to be employed for attaining
the objectives.

• Competition between groups: Interpersonal and interdepartmental conflict
may arise as a result of the various groups competing with each other over
sharing of an organization’s resources - time, money, space, materials and
equipment

• Unreasonable workloads/ standards: If the people in an organization are
asked to do more work than what is reasonably possible, it may result in
frustration, eventually culminating into interpersonal or inter-departmental
conflicts.