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CIA PART 3 – STUDY UNIT 10

Leadership and Conflict Management
Core Concepts

1. Leadership Styles
a. Management is arranging the work of others to achieve organizational objectives.
1) Leadership is a special type of management. It influences, inspires, and guides
people to strive willingly to achieve group objectives through common effort.
b. Power is the ability to influence employees to do what they would not ordinarily do. The
sources of power include (1) legitimate or position power, (2) expertise, (3) referent
power, (4) coercive power, and (5) control of rewards.
c. According to the traitist approach, leadership is a characteristic of the individual’s
personality and cannot be subdivided.
d. Behavior-oriented researchers have examined leader behavior to determine whether leaders
conduct themselves in certain ways. Styles of leadership are emphasized in behavioral
approaches. Traditional styles include the following:
1) Authoritarian or autocratic. The manager does not share authority and
responsibility. (S)he dictates all decisions to employees, so communication is
downward with little employee input.
2) Democratic. The leader delegates substantial authority.
3) Laissez faire. Employees in a group are given the authority and responsibility to make
their own decisions.
e. The leadership grid developed by Robert Blake and Jane Mouton is a trademarked
classification scheme. Concern for production is on the horizontal (x) axis, and concern for
people is on the vertical (y) axis. Each axis has a scale of 1 to 9. Thus, the primary styles
are the following:
1) Impoverished management (1,1) has little concern for production or people. The
manager’s main concern is not to be held responsible for mistakes.
2) Country club management (1,9) has a primary concern for people but little concern
for production.
3) Produce-or-perish management (9,1) has a primary concern for production but little
concern for people.
4) Middle-of-the-road management (5,5) has a moderate concern for production and
people to maintain status quo.
5) Team management (9,9) has a great concern for production and people, trust,
teamwork, and commitment.
2. Team Building
a. Participative management gives employees greater control of the workplace when
they can establish objectives, be involved in decision making, solve problems, or effect
organizational change.
1) Quality control circles, self-managed teams, and open-book management reflect the
participative principle.
b. A team is a group whose members work intensively with each other to achieve a specific
common goal.

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c. There are five stages in team development:

1) During the forming stage, the team starts to come together, and members behave
cautiously.
2) During the storming stage, team members start to feel comfortable expressing
disagreement and challenging others’ opinions.
3) During the norming stage, the team reaches consensus about roles and
responsibilities.
4) During the performing stage, the team becomes highly productive.
5) During the adjourning stage, the team has completed its task and is disbanded.
d. Synergy occurs when the combination of formerly separate elements has a greater effect
than the sum of their individual effects. When teams are comprised of individuals with
complementary rather than identical skills, they are able to create synergy in pursuing
collective goals.
3. Conflict Management
a. Conflict results in the perceptions of two parties that they are working in opposition to each
other in ways that result in feelings of discomfort or animosity.
b. Conflict can be categorized as cooperative conflict and competitive conflict.
1) Cooperative conflict is constructive. The existence of cooperative (shared) goals
is the basis for treating the conflict as a mutual problem. It is a means of avoiding
groupthink.
2) Competitive conflict is destructive. Opposite goals are pursued, and neither side
trusts or believes the other.
c. Conflict may be triggered by (1) badly defined job descriptions, (2) scarcity of
resources, (3) failure of communication, (4) deadlines, (5) unfair policies, (6) individual
personality differences, (7) differences in status, (8) not meeting expectations, or (9) role
incompatibility.
d. There are many responses to conflict.
1) Problem solving resolves the conflict by confronting it and removing its causes.
2) Withdrawing (smoothing) is a short-term avoidance approach. The parties are asked
by management to suspend their conflict temporarily.
3) Forcing occurs when a superior uses his or her formal authority to order a particular
outcome.
4) Superordinate goals are the overriding goals of the organization to which subunit and
personal goals are subordinate.
5) Other methods include compromise, competition, expanding resources, avoidance,
accommodation, and interest-based bargaining.
4. Negotiation Skills
a. Negotiation is a decision-making process. The parties are interdependent and do not have
the same preferred outcomes. The parties must decide through bargaining what values will
be exchanged by each side.
b. Effective negotiation allows the parties to meet their needs and to establish the trust
necessary for future bargaining. It emphasizes a win-win attitude.
1) In some cultures, the dominant approach is competitive. Rewards are given for
winning, and punishment is given for losing. This win-lose attitude views negotiation
as a zero-sum game.

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c. The best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA) is the acceptable minimum

outcome if a negotiator cannot obtain the desired result.
1) A reasonable BATNA protects against bad decisions caused by framing error,
escalation of commitment, or overconfidence.
2) The BATNA also helps to define the bargaining zone. It is the difference between the
BATNAs belonging to each side.
d. Other negotiation concepts include (1) added-value negotiating, (2) the principled
negotiation method, and (3) distributive and integrative bargaining.
5. Change Management
a. Change management is important to all organizations. Different types of change include
cultural change, product change, and structural change.
b. Organizational and procedural changes often are resisted by the individuals and groups
affected. This response may be caused by simple surprise, inertia, or fear of failure.
c. Organizational development (OD) provides a framework for managing change using the
findings of the behavioral sciences.
6. Project Management
a. A project is a temporary undertaking with specified objectives that often involves a cross-
functional team and working outside customary organizational lines.
b. A project life cycle generally includes (1) the initiation phase, (2) the planning phase,
(3) the execution phase, and (4) the closure phase.
c. Project management is the process of managing the tradeoff between the two major inputs
(time and cost) and the major output (quality).
d. Common techniques for project management include Gantt charts, the program evaluation
and review technique (PERT), and the critical path method (CPM). They are suitable for
any project having a target completion date and single start.
1) Gantt charts show the projected start and finish times for each task as well as for the
project as a whole.
2) PERT is a method used to analyze the tasks involved in completing a given project,
specifically, the time needed to complete each task and the minimum time needed to
complete the project.
3) CPM calculates the longest path of activities to the end of the project, and the earliest
and latest that each activity can start and finish without making the project longer.
This process determines which activities are “critical” (i.e., already on the longest
path) and which can be delayed without making the project longer. The critical path is
the sequence of activities which add up to the longest overall path.

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