Misunderstanding the Value of Conflict

A response to the Misunderstood Activity
created by Rachel Schultz (@Rachel Schultz)

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A concept that is frequently misunderstood in the experiential Group Dynamics course is the value of productive conflict. Students’ experience with conflict in the past may have left them with negative impressions about the consequences of tension or conflict, and many try to avoid it. The mainstream media doesn’t do a great job of presenting healthy ways of working through conflict, and there is a tendency to think of most conflict situations in terms of power, which can be ironically disempowering for people who don’t feel they have status. Furthermore, most groupwork they have been through only lasted a few days or weeks instead of for an entire semester, so it may have been easier to take a conflict avoidance approach. The teaching team of the course often finds themselves telling students that it’s not if you will experience conflict in groupwork in the course, it’s when; having conflict does not in itself negatively affect grades, but how your team deals with it will, as conflict management is one of the course outcomes.

I’ve been thinking about the analogy of exercising or vaccines to help explain productive conflict. Sometimes we expose ourselves to some discomfort in the pursuit of getting stronger or becoming healthier. The next time we’re faced with an infection, we’re better able to deal with it as we’ve built up immunity and coping techniques. These exposures are strategic, have guidelines surrounding them, and often take a team approach for those who lack expertise (for example, finding a personal trainer or having a nurse vaccinate you instead of trying to do it yourself). In fact, if we never exercised or came into contact with illness, we’d be quite fragile and harder hit by something like having to move to a new house or even the common cold.

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