Fundamental Human Resource Management (HRM) Aspects

BUSM4590 PEOPLE AND ORGANISATIONS
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Executive Summary
Conflicts in the workplace can undermine organisational processes, leading to failure to achieve the objectives. Conflict can be good or bad, and the five conversations addressed in this report play a central role in ensuring effective conflict management. The three leadership principles that were recommended for implementation in the organisation include building a comprehensive identity, holding tension at the executive level of the organisational structure, and embracing inconsistency. Mapping out the negation process ensures all the parties affected by the negotiation are considered to increase the probability of the process in its entirety. The human resource professional should play a central role in implementing measures to address barriers to effective communication, which could hinder information-sharing capabilities and organisational productivity. Implementing an ethical culture ensures the actions of leaders and followers are anchored on acceptable values and standards tailored to promote corporate social responsibility.
Table of Contents Executive Summary. 2 Introduction. 4 Good and Bad Conflict 4 Leadership Principles. 7 Negotiation. 9 Barriers to Effective Communication. 11 Ethical Leadership. 13 Conclusion. 14 References. 16
Introduction
Organisational leaders must demonstrate an advanced and integrated comprehension of how employees and teams play a central role in influencing their organisations' overall productivity and performance. This includes understanding central themes such as effective communication, negotiation, ethical practice, leadership principles, and positive and negative conflicts and how they influence organisational practices and behaviours. Developing extensive knowledge and perspectives on abovementioned issues helps develop practical solutions that promote business sustainability. Organizations dynamics are characterized by different factors as would be established in this report. This paper evaluates fundamental human resource management (HRM) aspects, including conflict management, negotiation, ethical practice, leadership principles, and effective communication, to understand how they inform practice to ensure business sustainability and stability.
Good and Bad Conflict
Organisational conflict refers to the state of workplace misunderstanding or disagreement by teams or individuals emanating from opposing ideas, belief systems, goals, values, or needs (Caesens et al., 2019, p. 1). Team conflicts do not primarily derive from differences in perspectives but due to perceived incompatibility in how different group members think and act. Conflicts at the workplace may add or destroy value. Good conflict supports respectful and authentic conversations geared at producing mutually beneficial solutions that are superior and better than the initially provided ones. On the other hand, bad conflict happens when team members are unable to address their differences, thus undermining innovation and organisational productivity (Toegel & Barsoux, 2016, p. 79). Bad conflicts are triggered by perceived inconsistency in how different group members work based on their personalities, gender, age, race, and industry.
The first conversation to diminish conflict entails spotting the difference. This approach recognises that team members are inclined to make quick judgments regarding their peer's competence, status, or character based on first impressions. Spotting the difference reduces conflicts by allowing team members to reflect on how they want to create the first impression on others to ensure they are not marginalised or discriminated against by others. The second conversation entails acting to address misjudging behaviour. Clashing behavioural inclinations are likely to manifest in diverse teams, thus causing trouble. The manager should address trivial gestures that could significantly impact workplace cohesion, aggravating stereotypes, disrupting communication flows, and alienating people. This conversation entails setting boundaries, attitudes, and assertiveness to ensure colleagues understand one another, thus reducing the potential for workplace conflicts. The third conversation entails speaking to ensure language does not divide team members (Toegel & Barsoux, 2016, p. 82). This entails encouraging appropriate communication styles, including the choice of words to express oneself, tolerance for honesty, pauses, interruptions and humour to reduce the potential for misunderstanding.
The fourth conversation entails thinking about ways to encourage different mindsets in decision-making and problem-solving endeavours. One of the primary sources of conflict in teams relates to how members think concerning their work. Therefore, it is vital to establish an alignment on risk tolerance and shifting priorities to embrace different perspectives and work towards shared goals. The fifth conversation entails recognising and charting emotions. It is congruent to the fact that the team members differ extensively in their intensity of feelings, how they demonstrate passion for the team's objectives, and their approaches to managing emotions, especially when faced with conflict or disagreement (Toegel & Barsoux, 2016, p. 83). This conversation is crucial because it ensures that some team members' negative emotions, including enthusiasm, do not overwhelm or fuel scepticism in peers (Todorova et al., 2022, p. 8). Therefore, conversations should recognise the possibilities of negative feelings and the risks of venting in undermining organisational cohesiveness.
Good conflicts involve positive struggle interaction that empowers the conflicting parties to reach an excellent, innovative, and strong consensus to serve the purpose. For example, discussing the appropriate advertisement technique for a product could lead to conflicts within the team. Member A might present the idea of a pull-up banner, whereas Member B is oriented towards using digital tools for the advertisement. Member B shares the idea of digital advertising and the potential to expand product reach, identify new customers, and diversify the firm's revenue streams. On the other hand, Member A of the team argued that using a pull-up banner is more cost-effective while serving the same purpose. This is a good conflict because differences in ideas drive it, and deliberation could establish the most feasible advertisement approach to use. The conflict here relates to differences in team members' cognitive styles and perspectives concerning the subject matter. The human resource manager should facilitate this conversation by establishing ways to match team mindsets and thinking styles (Toegel & Barsoux, 2016, p. 83). The team members should also be encouraged to establish alignment on tolerance for different mindsets and the need to shift priorities in order to create a consensus.
Accordingly, an example of a bad conflict related to customer dissatisfaction with their recently purchased product. Considering the customer purchases an automobile on cash terms and discovers that it has a faulty engine in the first week, they might get frustrated and reach the sales representative requesting a refund. In this situation, the customer tries to get in touch with the sales representative on several occasions but still does not get a solution to their problem. This is a bad conflict because the two parties are unable to address the disagreement, and thus might undermine business performance and sales volumes in the future. The HR manager should devise the sale processes to ensure it includes targeted discourse on solving customer dissatisfaction instead of ignoring their requests. This includes a training program that empowers workers with different ways to act, speak, look, feel, and think to immunise the sales force and customers against unproductive conflict due to work demands and un-met expectations (Toegel & Barsoux, 2016, p. 81).
Leadership Principles
Successful companies learn to leverage leadership principles to manage organisational tensions that derive from conventional and innovative and encourage an environment characterised by routine creative conflicts at the top tiers of the organisational structure. This is what Tushman et al. (2011) called leading ambidextrously. According to Tushman et al. (2011), there exist three leadership principles that assist companies in expanding their business mandate amid the need to design new offerings that paradigm shifts in their industries: (a) engaging top-tier teams to create a synergistic strategic aspiration, (b) managing tensions between innovative demands for units and the primary corporate mandate at the top levels of the organisational structure, and (c) embracing inconsistency based on different and typically conflicting strategic objectives.
The significance of creating a shared organisational identity is well-established in scholarly discourse. There are various considerations when developing an overarching identity, including whether the company has an emotionally compelling identity to incorporate the existing services and products, establishing a broad identity to achieve aspirational thresholds, and ensuring the identity is limited to customer solutions or teams that could experience disruptions in the future (Tushman et al., 2011, n.p). The HR manager can cultivate an overarching identity by ensuring their organisation lives its values and purpose. This includes articulating and role-modelling the desired individual behaviours and mindsets connected to the purpose of establishing "moments that matter" in the corporate culture and converting purpose into a system of shared employee and leadership behaviours and norms (Komm et al., 2021, n.p). For example, Scania is a commercial-automobile manufacturer that holds a yearly "Climate Day," where the organisation halts operations for an hour to train employees on sustainability congruent with the goal of driving a shift towards a sustainable transport system.
Holding tension at the organisation's top tier entails ensuring innovation units are anchored on ownership, reporting lines, the locus of debate, and effective coordination. The efforts of team members in developing innovative units should coincide with top management priorities to ensure synergy. For example, a small team, several levels down the organisational structure committed to developing a portable prototype to revolutionise the market could fail to obtain executive attention, whose focus is on expanding the firm's market share (Tushman et al., 2011, n.p). In this vein, negotiations for resources and capital must involve top management to avoid a tension trap, which could undermine the company's prospects. The HR professional can support this principle by ensuring decisions are collectively made by top leadership, especially regarding allocating resources and achieving trade-offs between the status quo and the future (Komm et al., 2021, n.p). For example, the HR professional can play a central role in shifting the company from a conventional hierarchy to a context that offers resources and talent to a cluster of empowered team members, assisting them in realising their missions and offering guidance.
Lastly, leaders should embrace inconsistency related to measuring innovation units against the core business performance standards. This entails ensuring innovation businesses are not evaluated and appraised against simi...