Resolving Violated Expectations in Organizations

Violated Expectation and Team Conflicts Almost all the conflicts that are experienced within the organization are as a result of violated expectations that two parties or groups experience. The normal functioning of the human mind is that the other person or other group would think and act like they do or think, but often this is not the case as there are divergent ideas and ways of thinking that often emerge.

This concept of the other party acting differently from what one expected is what is referred to as violated expectations. The violated expectations often undermine the trust between two people or parties and when one feels the trust is betrayed or broken, the end result is conflict between the two individuals (Patterson K. et.al., 2004).

One of the most predominant case of violated expectation is when a junior employee feels that the manager or his supervisor needs to help him accomplish a given task, and yet on the other hand, the manager or supervisor feels that the junior employee needs to accomplish the task on his own.

Another related instance is when a manager assigns a given task to an employee who feels he should not be the one to handle that particular task, this often creates violated expectations and if not quickly handled degenerates to passive conflict or active conflict. Here, the employee will either handle it in a substandard manner or not do it after all. Yet another workplace violated conflict is the assigning of duties to another employee yet the first employee feels he should be the one to handle such issues.

He expected to be given the work or the assignment be directed to his department and that does not happen, it creates a violated expectations scenario. All these above cases are evidently issues to do with lack of proper communication of intention and expectations. There is need to have all employees feel free to communicate what they expect from a given assignment and also to express their objections to the relevant authorities.

The managers or supervisors also need to keenly listen to the reasons for the objections and understand why the given employee has a different expectation from their own. This will help the two parties come to an amicable conclusion and settlement that will not only see the peaceful resolution, but also have the task handled to the logical conclusion in the right manner and by the right individual.

One of the easiest and most effective ways of handling such violated expectations in the workplace is through engaging in team approach to the tasks that are controversial. The manager may not necessarily excuse the employee from doing the task, or exclude the other employees and assign the task entirely to the complaining employee but engage in teamwork. This collective approach to tasks will not.