Our Chinese supervisor is not a fan of significant changes. His working philosophy heavily leans on getting a job done first, and get it done fast, with as little modification as possible. He takes pride in how little difference we had to make for the program in the past two decades. This Chinese supervisor’s leadership style and conflict resolution style often contrast with our American officer’s method of choice. His non-confrontational conflict resolution style means he prefers to talk to the person of conflict in one-on-one settings instead of on the spot, in public or during team meetings. By dealing with conflict indirectly, the Chinese supervisor honors the other person’s or “saves their face”. While this reflects well on the high avoidance culture of China, this method also adds a challenge in my office with the lower power distance culture American staff implant in the workplace (Tuleja, 2017). Our American Officers often welcomes teammates to deal with disagreement or small conflict directly during meetings to “talk to out”.
Depends on the type of conflict and the present audience, sometimes a task conflict turns into a relationship conflict due to the pressure leaders put into to deal with it on the spot, instead of giving it time to cool down. The struggle of bringing balanced cultural view on conflict resolution resonates with me. After a closer look at conflict resolution from the course, I took it upon myself to bring more understanding of the cultural dynamic in the office by offering compromise solutions to the Chinese supervisor or ask the American Officer for some processing time for the team to think things through. I have learned during conflict management, part of the leaders’ responsibilities came from the help members separate their emotions from figure-pointing blaming during a conflict (Runde & Flanagan, 2008). As Cooper et al. (2017) suggest, depending on the level of trust leaders establish in the situation, they could influence the type of conflict and consequently, the outcome.
Action Plan
In OLL Program
As an online cohort, our group projects are conducted through virtual teams. In the article Rethinking Teambuilding, Hart and Mcleod (2003) note the teams with the strongest personal relationship also exchange more task-oriented communications. Drawing insight from my experiences thus far, I found a certain level of personal exchange and relationship building is essential in building trust. I would argue it is even more important for virtual teams since the quality of the scheduled calls already determines the task-oriented nature of the exchange. When my teammates spend that few extra minutes before or after our project discussion to connect outside our school work, the teams grow closer.
One practical step for me to take is to be more open about my strengths and weaknesses based on the tasks. During the first set of group assignments, I felt a little shy to admit my hesitation to take the lead on the writing portion. I also sensed other team members were hesitated to claim their preferred tasks directly. It took us two group calls to came up with specific roles and d
