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Chapter 12
Managing Conflict, Stress, and Time
After reading and studying this chapter, the student
should be able to:
Identify the causes of conflict.
Discuss conflict management styles and
identify when each would be appropriate.
Describe principled negotiation.
Explain why modern life makes us particularly
vulnerable to stress.
Describe both the costs and the benefits of
stress.
Explain the major causes of stress.
Compare and contrast Type A behavior and
Type B behavior.
Elaborate on personal ways to cope with
stress.
Discuss some ways to effectively manage
time.
Brief Outline
Causes of Conflict
Conflict Management Styles
Using Principled Negotiation to
Resolve Conflict
Overcoming Interpersonal Conflicts
What is Stress?
Definition of Stress
The Costs of Stress
The Positive Aspects of Stress
Major Causes of Stress
Life Events
Personal Psychological Makeup
Organizational and Work-Related
Factors
Burnout
Ways to Cope with Personal Stress
Physical Exercise
Relaxation Techniques
A Sense of Control
Developing and Maintaining Good
Interpersonal Relationships
Managing Your Time
The Time Long: Where Your Time
Goes
Setting Priorities: A “Must”
Handling the Common Time Wasters
Learning Objectives
SUPERVISORY MANAGEMENT Instructor’s Manual
The Facilitator: Developing Trusting Relationships
John Duncan works for TSI Consultants facilitating partnering workshops for large-scale construction
projects. His job involves coordinating premeetings with the key stakeholders, who typically include
the owner(s), architect(s), prime contractor(s), and key subcontractors, to determine the main issues
and establish an agenda for the partnering meeting. John’s task during the one– to three-day partnering
retreat is to provide facilitation to the group such that they are able to create a project management
culture focused on joint problem solving. One particular project involved the U.S. Navy and the city of
Honolulu on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. The Navy was in the process of transferring a particular
piece of property to the city to be used for administrative office space. In his premeeting conversations
with the key stakeholders, John did not detect any noticeable anger or conflict. Therefore, the agenda
he devised primarily focused on establishing common goals, creating a project mission statement,
identifying potential issues, and developing action plans to address each issue.
I. Causes of Conflict
1. Different goals or objectives
• If departments or individuals within an organization are working toward different goals,
then conflict is almost always dysfunctional. It is important to develop a common set of
goals everyone supports.
2. Communication
• Misunderstandings may be due to semantics, unfamiliar language, or incomplete
information will surely lead to conflict.
3. Structure
• Competition for scarce resources, power struggles may occur between departments with
conflicting objectives or objectives or reward systems, or interdependence of two or more
groups to achieve their goals occur with organizational changes such as downsizing.
4. Personal
• Incompatibility of personal goals or social values of employees with the role behavior
required by their jobs will lead to conflict, as will certain personality characteristics, such
as authoritarianism or dogmatism. Individual stress can also be a source of intrapersonal
and interpersonal conflict.
Preview
Lecture Outline
SUPERVISORY MANAGEMENT Instructor’s Manual
on,” trying to surface all of the pertinent issues, and attempting to interpret differing
points of view.
• Conflict management theory today supports collaboration as the appropriate approach to resolve
conflict.
• During the 1970s and 1980s, the contingency movement gained momentum.
• Collaboration is a conflict management style more appropriate for ad hoc task forces and long-
term strategic problems.
III. Using Principled Negotiation to Resolve Conflict
• Fisher and Ury of the Harvard negotiation project emphasize, whether negotiation involves a
peace settlement among nations or a business contract, people often engage in positional
bargaining.
• Positional bargaining involves proposing and then giving up a sequence of positions.
• For this form of negotiation to succeed, it must meet three criteria of fair negotiation:
• It should produce a wise agreement if agreement is possible, it should be efficient, and it should
improve, or at least not damage, the relationship between the parties.
• When people bargain over positions, they tend to back, themselves into corners, resulting in
either win-lose or lose-lose outcomes.
• Arguing over positions often endangers an ongoing relationship. When negotiations involve
more than two parties, positional bargaining makes it difficult to negotiate an agreement.
• Fisher and Ury developed an alternative to positional bargaining they call principled
negotiation, or negotiation on the merits. The four basic components of principled negotiation
are as follows:
o Separating the people from the problem
o Focusing on interests, not positions
o Generating a variety of possibilities before deciding what to do
o Insisting that the result be based on some objective standard.
IV. Overcoming Interpersonal Conflicts
• Principled negotiation is an excellent approach for dealing with conflicts among departments
within an organization or resolving conflicts in joint ventures or partnerships.
• A more common problem is managing interpersonal conflicts.
• This challenge has accelerated because of fears of downsizing, mergers, and unknown
organizational futures.
• Dysfunctional interpersonal conflict can lead to poor morale, low productivity, increased
absenteeism, and higher turnover.
• Supervisors must learn conflict resolution strategies and teach them to other employees.
• Many interpersonal conflicts occur when one person finds another person’s behavior
uncomfortable, bullying, or irritating.
V. What Is Stress?
A. Definition of Stress
• Stress can be defined as any external stimulus that causes wear and tear on one’s
psychological or physical well-being.
CHAPTER NOTES Chapter 12
• Modern men and women sometimes react to the strains of work and everyday life the same
way the primitive ancestors did, when there is danger a chemical reaction in the body that
allowed them to either fight or flee..
• Job stress is “a condition arising from the interaction of people and their jobs and
characterized by changes within people that force them to deviate from their normal
functioning.”
• Under normal conditions, our body and mind are in a state of equilibrium. Equilibrium may
be disrupted by events on- or off-the-job.
B. The Costs of Stress
• Two-thirds of all visits to doctors involve stress-related symptoms.
• Stress is a major contributor to heart disease, cancer, lung problems, accidents, cirrhosis of
the liver, and suicide.
• Stress symptoms play a major role in absenteeism, accidents, and lost productivity.
• A person under severe and/or prolonged stress cannot function as effectively.
C. The Positive Aspects of Stress
• Moderate amounts of stress improve performance.
• Life is full of stressors that can stimulate, energize, and aid in such positive outcomes as
individual health and high productivity.
VI. Major Causes of Stress
A. Life Events
• Stress occurs whenever people face situations that require changes in behavior and a higher
level of activity.
• Researchers have identified major life events, both positive and negative, that require
changes in a person’s behavior.
• A major life event is anything that causes a person to deviate from normal functioning.
• The events are ranked in order of impact on a person’s life and given a point score.
B. Personal Psychological Makeup
• Americans are noted for their emphasis on work.
• Some people, however, have become so caught up in the work ethic that work becomes the
end itself rather than the means to an end.
• Americans have become workaholics, and this excessiveness has behavioral consequences
that take a toll over a period of time.
• Researchers identified two basic types of behavior characterizing people in our society: Type
A and Type B.
1. Type A behavior
• Type A behavior individuals who exhibit Type A behavior tend to accomplish too many
things in a short time.
• Lacking patience and struggling against time and other people to accomplish one’s ends
SUPERVISORY MANAGEMENT Instructor’s Manual
• Type A people tend to be workaholics and because of their psychological makeup they
may be subject to stress over prolonged periods.
• Type A individuals have a higher risk of heart disease than Type B people.
2. Type B behavior
• Type B behavior tend to be calmer, to take more time to exercise, and to be more
realistic than Type As in estimating the amount of time needed to complete an
assignment. Type Bs also worry less and, in general, desire more satisfaction from their
work.
• Sixty percent of managers and supervisors exhibit Type A behavior.
• Managers who exhibit extreme Type A behavior patterns tend to practice close
supervision and find it difficult to delegate.
• They are concerned errors might reflect on past achievements, so they become
excessively task oriented.
C. Organizational and Work-Related Factors
• Many organizational and work-related factors can cause excessive stress.
• If these factors exist in an organization over a period of time, they will cause extensive
damage in form of dissatisfaction, high turnover, low productivity, incomplete goal, and job
burnout.
D. Burnout
• Burnout is a stress-related malady that originates in the setting where people invest most of
their time and energy.
• Using an adapted version of the Maslack Burnout Inventory (MBI), researchers
Golembiewsk and Munzenrider discovered that 40% of the people they studied suffered from
advanced phases of burnout. A person scoring in phase I of MBI would be highly energized
and motivated by the positive aspects of stress.
• Difficulties occur when a person reaches phases VI, VII, and VIII, the advanced stages of
burnout.
• Candidates for job burnout have three distinguishing characteristics. First, they experience
stress caused predominantly by job-related stressors. Second, they tend to be idealistic and/or
self-motivated achievers. Third, they tend to seek unattainable goals.
• In the short term burnout can be managed through use of any of a variety of strategies for
coping with stress.
VII. Ways to Cope with Personal Stress
A. Physical Exercise
• People who exercise minimum of two or three times a week are less prone to adverse
symptoms of stress than those who do not.
• The exercise should be vigorous to the point of inducing perspiration.
B. Relaxation Techniques
• Relaxation techniques are easy to use and are effective. These techniques are particularly
CHAPTER NOTES Chapter 12
useful to supervisors/team leaders because they are neither time-consuming nor costly.
C. A Sense of Control
• Supervisors having a sense of control over their own lives handle stress better than those who
feel that they are manipulated by life’s events or other people.
• Some of the things that can be done to gain control are:
o Plan, look ahead, and identify both long-term goals and short-term goals.
o Get to know and like yourself.
o Perceive situations as challenges rather than problems.
o Take a long vacation rather than a series of short vacations.
o Do things for others.
o Provide yourself with positive reinforcement when you do something well.
D. Developing and Maintaining Good Interpersonal Relationships
• Giving priority to close personal relationships is important for one’s mental health and
happiness.
• According to psychologists Alex Michalos, good interpersonal relationships are much more
important to one’s happiness and well-being than either income or looks.
VIII. Managing Your Time
• Effective time management is essential for effective supervision.
• Time management is the ability to use one’s time to get things done when they should be done.
A. The Time Log: Where Your Time Goes
• The first step in time management is determining how your time is actually being spent.
• A conscientiously filled-in time log is an excellent way to get this information.
B. Setting Priorities: A “Must”
• Analyzing one’s time usage can show whether you are using time effectively.
• The secret is to spend time on those activities that are most important and that contribute
most to job success.
• A rating system can be used for classifying the priority of activities.
o A activities are the most important critical to your job.
o B activities are medium priority important, but less so than “A”s.
o C activities are low-priority, routine, and/or relatively unimportant.
• The efficient supervisor will spend a greater percentage of his or her time performing “A”
activities.
C. Handling the Common Time Wasters
• Many activities during a typical day are inefficient uses of time, or time wasters. These may
include doing routine work someone else could handle, socializing excessively, or fighting a
losing battle against paperwork.
IX. Chapter Review
CHAPTER NOTES Chapter 12
Forcing is an assertive, uncooperative style in which the individual’s concern for self is high
2. Discuss what is involved in principled negotiation. How does it differ from hard or soft
negotiation?
(2) focusing on interests, not positions; (3) generating a variety of possibilities before deciding
3. Compare and contrast Type A behavior and Type B behavior.
People with Type A behavior tend to try to accomplish too many things in a short time. They lack
4. What are the major causes of stress on the job? Off the job?
Organizational and work-related factors range from having poorly defined job descriptions to
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makeup can also have behavioral consequences. Type A people are particularly subject to stress.
5. Explain why exercise and relaxation techniques are helpful in coping with stress.
6. What can a supervisor do to prevent stress in his or her unit?
7. Why and how can time management help with stress and the achievement of effective results?
Skill Builder 12.1
Up in Smoke Are You Burned Out?
Works with SCANS competencies: Information, Systems
This is an individual test for job burnout. The scoring system is explained in the text.
Skill Builder 12.2
A Planning Strategy to Cope with Stress
Works with SCANS competencies: Resources
List the things that are causing stress in your life at the present time. Determine which factors are
causing positive stress and which are potentially negative and harmful.
Solutions to the Skill Builders
CHAPTER NOTES Chapter 12
volunteers to report similarities and differences in their groups.
Skill Builder 12.3
A Personal Time Survey
Works with SCANS competencies: Information, Resources, Systems
This is an individual survey to calculate how many hours a student needs to study. Results will be
individual.
Case 12-1
Entrepreneur
This case focuses on teams of three to five students assuming the role of a consulting team asked to
help Sam Hinton get control of his company and his life. To do so, the following instructions are
outlined below:
1. Drawing from your own experiences and from what you have learned in this chapter, develop
Case 12-2
The Missed Promotion
1. How should Bobbi approach Paul about the situation?
Bobbi will have to approach Paul very carefully, realizing that he has had a major
2. What do you think Paul’s reaction(s) will be?
3. Do you agree with the company’s policy of promoting only college graduates to the
maintenance superintendent position? Why or why not?
Solutions to the Case