Conflict management strategies in school leadership

¶ … conflict in your organization influence the overall institutional environment?

School-level children and adolescents across the globe will grow up to encounter a future that is starkly different from that encountered by prior generations. Scientific innovations and technological advancements are greatly accelerating information and knowledge availability. The current world may be described as a progressively interdependent global community, in which a particular nation\'s failures and successes impact several other nations (OECD, 2014). Increasing concerns are being voiced regarding the lack of change in school leaders\' industrial-era roles to cope with the current age\'s complex challenges for which schools ready their pupils. With evolving school leader requirements, school-context leadership role distribution and definition ought to evolve as well. Another high-priority aspect is succession planning, geared at ensuring superior-quality future school leadership. This swiftly evolving school context raises numerous issues necessitating responses by school leadership-related policies and practices (OECD, 2014).

Within my organizational (i.e., school) setting, conflict assumes various forms. Educators, for instance, tend to disobey the school leader (principal), do not abide by rules or take on extra work, and often don\'t have good dealings with superiors. Further, the principal also practices an authoritative leadership style. For instance, educators are pressurized to ensure uninterrupted school-activity functioning. Hence, naturally, principal-educator conflicts take place from time to time within the school setting. Conflict differs from discomfort. Conflicts aren\'t issues; rather, issues arise if conflicts aren\'t handled properly (Ghaffar, 2010).

Describe leadership strategies used to avoid or alleviate such conflict

According to Roger T. Johnson and David W. Johnson (1996), peer mediation and conflict settlement initiatives are generally supported as the means to decreasing ill-managed conflict and violence within school settings. Conflict management is an aspect of human relations long understood and practiced by the industrial and commercial sectors as an essential element of organizational and individual development. Caruthers and Sweeney (1996) present a very broad but succinct definition of the conflict resolution process, describing it as a process employed by conflicting entities to arrive at a settlement.

The following approaches are specifically identified as conflict resolution methods:

(1) Avoidance

(2) Problem solving

(3) Compromise

(4) Smoothing

(5) Superordinate objectives

(6) Changing structural variables

(7) Changing human variables and (8) Authoritative command (Ghaffar, 2010)

What would you do differently as a leader in this organization such that conflict is minimized?

As conflict is apparently inevitable, especially within school settings, school administrators need to, clearly, be capable of recognizing it, learn its management, understand its destructive and constructive capacity, and practically implement conflict management approaches. Conflict resolution may be considered constructive if it (a) Leads to an end result satisfactory to all conflicting parties, (b) improves conflicting parties\' relationships, and (c) improves conflicting parties\' ability of constructively settling conflicts in the future (Ghaffar, 2010).