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Chapter Eleven
Interpersonal Behavior
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Introduction
Almost every working relationship will
produce some degree of conflict across time.
Whether conflicts are destructive (dysfunctional) or
constructive (functional) depends on the attitudes
and skills of participants.
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The Nature of Conflict
 An interpersonal process that can arise from
disagreement over almost anything
• Managers spend about 20 percent of their time
dealing with conflict
• Lack of interpersonal skills can derail even the
most promising career
 Levels of Conflict
• Intrapersonal
• Interpersonal
• Intergroup
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Sources of Conflict
 Interpersonal conflict arises from:
• Organizational change
• Different sets of values
• Threats to status
• Contrasting perceptions
• Lack of trust
• Personality clashes
• Incivility
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A Model of Conflict
 Conflict varies in the:
• Speed of its emergence
• Degree of its predictability
 If conflict will be harmful, managers must apply
a conflict resolution strategy to:
• Prevent it
• Diminish it
• Remove it
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Conflict Outcomes
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Conflict Outcomes
 Conflict outcomes are a product of the
participants’ intentions as well as their strategies
 Resolution Strategies
• Avoiding
• Smoothing
• Forcing
• Compromising
• Confronting
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Only the confronting
strategy is truly a
resolution approach
Conflict Resolution Preferences
 Research evidence suggests that:
• Males and managers prefer the forcing approach
• Females rely on other tactics, including
collaboration
• Employees prefer avoiding, smoothing, or
compromising
• Each party tends to mimic the style of the other
• Confrontation is used in performance appraisals;
compromise is used on issues involving personal
habits and mannerisms
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Negotiating Tactics
 To resolve conflict in a win-win fashion:
• Select a neutral site
• Arrange seating in a comfortable fashion
• Prohibit observers
• Set deadlines to force a resolution
• Set minimum and optimum goals in advance
• Gather data thoroughly
• Listen carefully
• Focus on issues, not personalities
• Separate facts from feelings
• Search for areas where concessions are possible
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Assertive Behavior
 Assertiveness
• Expressing feelings
• Asking for legitimate changes
• Giving and receiving honest feedback
• Asking another to change an offensive behavior
• Comfortably refusing unreasonable requests
• Being direct, honest, and expressive
• Feeling confident
• Making others feel valued
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Power and Politics
Power is the ability to
influence other people and events.
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Types of Power
 Five Bases of Power
• Personal power
• Legitimate power
• Expert power
• Reward power
• Coercive power
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Organizational Politics
 Political skill consists of:
• Being socially astute
• Having interpersonal influence
• Creating useful networks
• Expressing sincerity
 Pros and Cons
• Can help attain promotion or sell proposal
• Can gain personal visibility
• Can be self-serving, manipulative, and deceivful
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Organizational Politics
 Many managers agree that…
• Politics is common in most organizations
• Managers must be good at politics to succeed
• Politics becomes more important at higher levels
• Politics can detract from organizational
efficiency
 Traditional power sources no longer work
• One can influence others through mutually
beneficial exchanges
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Influence and Political Power
 Steps to increase your influence…
• Treat the other party as a potential ally
• Specify your objectives
• Learn about other’s needs, interests, and goals
• Inventory your own resources to identify
something of value to offer
• Assess your relationship with the other person
• Decide what to ask for and what to offer
• Make the actual exchange that produces a gain
for both parties
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Tactics to Gain Political Power
 Networking
 Social exchange
 Form alliances
 Become identified with a higher authority
 Control information
 Give service selectively
 Acquire power and status symbols
 Grab power from others
 Join or form interest groups
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Tactics to Gain Political Power
 Political Power
• Comes from support of key individuals/groups
• Arises from the ability to work with people and
social systems to gain allegiance and support
 Self-Monitors
• High self-monitors are better at using
organizational politics than are others
• Low self-monitors are more insulated from
social cues, behave as they wish, show less
concern for making a positive impression
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Impression Management
Protecting self image while
intentionally affecting another’s assessment
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Impression Management
 Common Impression Management Strategies
• Personal competence and high performance
• Meeting commitments or solving a crisis
• Sending positive nonverbal cues
• Appropriate and/or edited self-disclosure
• Self-promotion based on results, along with
name dropping
• Ingratiation activities
• Exaggerating skills and achievements
• Attributing one’s problems to others
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Chapter 12 - Types of Groups
 Formal
• Established by the organization
• Have a public identity and goal to achieve
 Informal
• Emerge on the basis of common interests,
proximity, and friendships
 Temporary
• Committee or task force
 Permanent
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Nature of Informal Organizations
 An informal organization is a network of
personal and social relations
• Not established by the formal organization
• Arises spontaneously
• Tends to remain small in size
• Can be internal or external to the organization
 Informal power attaches to a person
• Formal power attaches to a position
 The formal manager and informal leader are
usually two different persons
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Informal and Formal Group Differences
Item
General nature
Informal Org.
Unofficial
Formal Org.
Official
Major concepts
Power, politics
Primary focus
Person
Authority,
responsibility
Position
Leader power
Given by group
Delegated by mgmt
Norms
Rules and policies
Sanctions
Rewards, penalties
Behavior guidelines
Sources of control
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Informal Group Emergence
 Informal organizations emerge from within the
formal structure
 This combination can have unexpected results
• Employees act different than required
• Employees interact with different people or with
different frequency
• Workers may embrace a different set of
attitudes, beliefs, and sentiments than expected
 The combination of required and emergent
behaviors makes it hard to predict employee
performance and satisfaction
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Member Status and Informal Leaders
 Causes of informal status are infinite
• The person with the largest amount of informal
status becomes its informal leader
 The informal leader
• Models and explains key norms
• Helps build and sustain group cohesiveness
• Uses the high esteem of this position to balance
the additional responsibilities
 Informal groups often overlap
• May be several leaders of varying importance
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Identifying and Rewarding Informal Leaders
 Informal leaders have distinct behaviors
• Acting as spokesperson
• Being the center of attention
• Offering well-received wisdom and guidance
 Informal leadership can be a form of job
enrichment
• Provides variety in the workday
• Offers feeling of greater significance
• Satisfies social needs
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Identifying and Rewarding Informal Leaders
 One Primary Leader
• Several persons may be informal leaders, but
one is primary
 Cautions
• An informal leader doesn’t always make the best
formal leader
• Informal leaders are typically rated as
“quarrelsome” but not “sensible”
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Monitoring Informal Organizations
 Network Charts
• Focuses on feelings expressed or behaviors
exhibited
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Formal Groups
 Managers feel that time spent in group meetings
is a significant time waster
• A source of confusion and misinformation
• An excuse for indecision
 Factors contributing to negative attitudes
• Participants withhold their true feelings
• Negative mindset that “meetings don’t work”
• Missing or incomplete information
• Meetings are poorly run
• Viewed as end result, not means to an end
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Committees
 Specific type of group meeting in which
members in their group role have the authority
to handle the problem at hand
• Usually one vote per member
• Workers and supervisors are equals
• Can be difficult to adjust from normal work
roles and relationships
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Systems Factors to Consider
 Group size
 Composition
 Agendas (surface and hidden)
• Critical to the success of
a committee meeting
 Leadership roles (task and social)
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Effective Surface Agendas
 Agendas should:
• Specify the date, time, and place of the meeting
• Indicate a primary purpose for the meeting
• List presenters and time allotted for presentation
and discussion
• Help the group focus on decisions
• Have room for new items to be added
• Address items in priority order
• Identify the date, time, and place of the next
meeting
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Facilitating Meetings
 Commonsense Practices
• Consider who should be present, and when
• Consider who does not need to be there
• Select a good site for the meeting
• Use technology
• Give appropriate credit to those who
participated, and drawing out those who didn’t
• Use open questions
• Balance serious discussions with fun
• Summarize progress, identify unresolved issues,
make assignments for the future
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Structured Approaches
 Brainstorming
 Nominal group technique
 Delphi decision making
 Dialectic decision methods
 Group decision support system
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Brainstorming
 Participant Guidelines
• Generate as many ideas as possible
• Be creative, freewheeling, and imaginative
• Build upon, extend, or combine earlier ideas
• Withhold criticism of others’ ideas
 Underlying Principles
• Deferred judgment
• Quantity breeds quality
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Nominal Group Technique
 Group exists in name only, with minimal
member interaction
• Members are brought together and given a
problem
• Solutions are developed independently
• Ideas are shared in a structured format
• Brief time is allotted for clarification questions
• Members individually designate their solution
preference via secret ballot
• The group decision is announced
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Delphi Decision Making
 A panel of relevant people is chosen
 Questionnaires are sequentially distributed to the
respondents, who do not meet face-to-face
 Written responses are summarized and fed back to
members
 Participants make another decision based on the
new information
 The process is repeated until responses converge
satisfactorily
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Dialectic Decision Making
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Group Decision Support System
 Uses computers, decision models, and
technological advances to:
• Remove communication barriers
• Structure the decision process
• Direct the group’s discussion
 Pros and Cons
• Higher quality decisions
• Little known about effects on member
satisfaction, participants’ sense of involvement,
or balance of task and social roles needed
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Consensus: A Key Issue
 Is consensus necessary?
• It may become the paramount goal
• Frustrates members who have to keep discussing
a subject long after their minds are made up
• Situation is a waste of time and an
embarrassment to dissenters
• Can delay worthwhile projects unnecessarily
 Most employers do not expect unanimity for
committee decisions
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Consensus: A Key Issue
 Ideas for Reaching Consensus
• Conduct a straw poll
• Suggest a supermajority vote
• Ask members to withdraw controversial
proposals or concerns, or stand aside to let the
group proceed
• Create a subgroup and empower it to make a
decision
• Distill concerns into major groups to pinpoint
patterns of problems
• Expedite closing of discussion via a “go around”
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Consensus: A Key Issue
 Facilitation Skills
• Help the group attain success
• Maximize efficient use of time
• Help group feel satisfied with its efforts
• Encourage separation of idea-getting from
idea-evaluation
• Generate multiple solutions
• Avoid personal attacks
• Attain balanced contributions from members
• Piggyback on other’s ideas
• Identify criteria for judging potential solutions
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Weaknesses of Committees
 Slowness and expensiveness
 Groupthink
 Polarization
 Escalating commitment
 Divided responsibility
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Weaknesses of Committees
 Symptoms of Groupthink
• Self-censorship of critical thoughts
• Rationalization that what they are doing is
acceptable to others
• Illusion of invulnerability
• Reliance on self-appointed mind-guards
• Illusion of unanimity without testing for it
• Stereotyping others outside the group
• Illusion of morality
• Pressure on dissidents to give in and conform
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