Introduction
In the gap analysis completion, my current organization experience was applied. The situation under study was a conflict between the team leader and the team members. The conflict resulted in a loss of work morale among team members, which would further result in decreased production and performance. The issue caught the attention of the management and an investigation was launched into the matter by conducting interviews among all the members of the team. The responses were tabulated, the cause of the conflict was established and recommendations were made on the future work model of the team (Smith, Foley and Panter, 2019). In this way, first-hand information was obtained. The conflict originated from the fact that the team leader treated some team members differently by assigning them his own and favored the team’s roles. As a result, some team members, including myself, felt and raised an ethical concern over the team leader.
The team leader and his absconded duties and allocated them to other members who were not allowed to report to work late or miss duties even on a reasonable basis. These developments resulted in ethical issues conflicts based on the ignored by the team leader. The disgruntled team members, including myself, raised the ethical concerns with the team leader who, instead of taking a pacifying step, stepped up his unethical while continuing to favor the others. Due to these, the team leader, instead of acting in the spirit of team workmanship, acted in self-interest.
Challenges Encountered in Identifying Variables
As a member of the team, I faced the ethical challenge to approach the team leader for these unethical and unprofessional acts of wrongdoing and carry out an investigation into the sources of conflict and putting myself at risk of losing my job. By collecting the views from a few affected people, I was able to narrow it down to main points and used them in making a questionnaire. The overburdened part of the team was also unwilling to open up or take part in interviews due to conflict of interest fearing losing their jobs. This step was to ensure that the right decisional of organizational interest was reached as opposed to personal interest (Pitafi, Khan, Khan, and Ren, 2020). It is through courage and interviews that qualitative data would be collected and turned into quantitative data. The interviews were thus conducted in the form of questionnaires with the participant’s identities withheld to protect them.
Applying the Lessons Learned in Organizational Conflict
It is more prudent to use questionnaires with no identity requirement to address the fears of the participant when there is a conflict between juniors and their superiors. The questionnaire questions should be structured in scale form to allow for easy conversion of qualitative information into quantitative data. Though these, major organizational conflicts and their effects on productivity can be identified to ensure quantitative data input matches the qualitative information (Thiem, 2022). In this way, the sources of conflict are identified professionally without further grudges emanating from the conflict resolution efforts. The gaps in organizational conflict can also be analyzed by the use of questionnaires.
Gap Analysis Table
NOTE: Negative numbers show that the issue was not important and the skill satisfaction was higher than the importance.
References
Pitafi, A. H., Khan, A. N., Khan, N. A., & Ren, M. (2020). Using enterprise social media to investigate the effect of workplace conflict on employee creativity. Telematics and Informatics, 55, 101451. Web.
Smith, L., Foley, L., & Panter, J. (2019). Activity spaces in studies of the environment and physical activity: A review and synthesis of implications for causality.Health & Place, 58, 102113. Web.
Thiem, A. (2022). Beyond the facts: limited empirical diversity and causal inference in qualitative comparative analysis.Sociological Methods & Research, 51(2), 527-540. Web.