Pros and cons of accommodating conflict

Pros-Cons-Faults-&-Fixes

Based on the required readings, lecture materials, scenario, and video for Week 7, you will turn in a word processing document with the following elements:

1. A cover sheet.

2. No less than four full pages of written text the Pros-Cons-Faults-And-Fixes technique to determine which option (or variation thereof) you recommend the TPD pursue. This section must include:

a. An introduction (no less than 5 sentences),

b. An explicit thesis statement (“This paper does this, this, and this.”),

c. The results of your Pros-Cons-Faults-And-Fixes analysis comparing Option 1 and Option 2 presented in the scenario lecture for this week.

d. And a conclusion answering the question, “So what?” about the rest of your paper (no less than 5 sentences).

3. A bibliography of ALL sources used for your paper in APA format (use http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01/ as a guide if necessary).

4. An addendum to the paper showing your Pros-Cons-Faults-And-Fixes matrix.

Your assignment should carefully adhere to the following guidelines:

1. All formatting, from the structure of the paper to citations, should conform to APA guidelines.

2. All work must be original and in your own words. No direct quotes permitted.

3. Use a 12-point font with 1-inch margins, double-spaced.

4. All text should be written in standard prose (no bullet points).

Approaches to Intelligence Analysis

All people and organizations experience conflict. More often than not we think of conflict as representing something negative because we associate it with broken relationships or failed ways of doing business. In reality, however, conflict offers opportunities to clarify relationships and to improve processes that can be taken advantage of if we look for them.

One of the first steps in being able to exploit conflict for better rather than worse is being able to identify the dynamics behind conflict interactions. In the moment of conflict, we often react rather than think, which can cloud our ability to analyze what is going on behind the arguments and stress. At the organizational level, all groups have some sort of mechanism to manage conflict, even if they are informal or highly reliant on personal relationships within the institution.

This lecture addresses conflict in the context of our work in criminal intelligence analysis first by examining the styles people use when they are in conflict, and second by exploring some of the considerations behind how organizations can design processes to mitigate the damaging effects of conflict while harnessing its capacity to reveal new solutions to old problems. It forms the theoretical background for the practical considerations we have already given to conflict management when we read Chapter 10 in our textbook, and when we produced the written activity in Week 4.

Conflict Styles

Conflict styles are approach strategies one party uses to participate in conflict. Research in the field of conflict studies has identified five primary conflict styles: competing, avoiding, compromising, accommodating, and problem-solving.

Competing conflict styles are those in which one party attempts to exercise a coercive influence on the other in order to achieve the first party’s goals.

Conflict styles characterized as avoiding are those in which one party attempts to neglect, delay, or deny interaction with the conflict because it has lower concerns for both disputant’s aspirations.

Compromising conflict styles are those in which a party attempts to divide its aspirations and the other party’s aspirations to the point that the conflict between them no longer energizes either disputant.

Accommodating conflict styles are those in which one party’s concern for the other’s aspirations overwhelm its concern for its own aspirations, causing the first party to give-in to the other.

Problem-solving conflict styles are those in which one party seeks an integrative solution that achieves both disputants’ aspirations (Pruitt & Kim, 2004). The most desirable conflict style in collaborative organizations is problem-solving, although we all must learn to work with people whose first response to conflict may be one (or more) of the other styles.

A range of influences in varying degrees defines the characteristics of the five conflict styles: assertiveness, cooperation, disclosure, empowerment of the self and of the other, active involvement, and flexibility. Table 1 shows how the conflict styles relate to the influences that evoke them. The level of assertiveness, cooperation, and the empowerment of the other, meaning the concern one party has for another’s aspirations, establishes the five major categories of conflict styles, while variations within those categories express the other characteristics in accordance with more nuanced tactical considerations (Folger et al., 2009; Pruitt & Kim, 2004).

When a party uses a competing conflict style it seeks to achieve its aspirations regardless of the other’s wants. This focus leads to a high level of assertiveness, low level of cooperation, empowerment of the self over the other, and a high level of active involvement with the conflict. When engaged in a contending manner, a competing style demonstrates moderate levels of disclosure and flexibility, but when engaged in a forcing manner, it demonstrates these qualities to lesser degrees. A person’s adoption of competing conflict styles indicates he or she not only has little concern for the other person, but also has little concern for his or her relationship with that person (Katz & Lawyer, 1992).

1. Overall, avoiding conflict styles are characterized by low levels of assertiveness and cooperation, and does not seek the empowerment of the other. In its protective variation, it favors low disclosure and high empowerment of the self, with a low level of active involvement and flexibility. As the avoidant person increases his or her disclosure from low/moderate to moderate, it takes on the forms of withdrawing and smoothing, respectively, with both these variations having higher levels of flexibility (moderate) than protecting. Only smoothing, however, also reaches a moderate level of active involvement. The use of avoiding conflict styles may indicate that a party doubts the survivability of his or her relationship with the other person under conditions of higher assertiveness and/or active involvement in the conflict interaction (Katz & Lawyer, 1992).

2. Compromising is characterized by moderate levels of assertiveness and cooperation, and does seek to empower both parties. Compromising styles have two variations, firm and flexible, but they are moderately flexible in terms of how much the person is willing to adjust his or her behaviors and aspirations to reach a settlement. The distinction arises when a person wishes to maintain a low level of disclosure but a high level of active involvement in the conflict interaction, which constitutes firm compromising as opposed to flexible compromising and allows for more disclosure but lower involvement. A person uses compromising styles when he or she does not perceive the likelihood for a mutually satisfying resolution and so tries to mitigate losses while maximizing gains (Katz & Lawyer, 1992).

3. When a person uses the accommodating style, he or she expresses little assertiveness but a lot of cooperation, seeking to empower the other over the self. When yielding, the person demonstrates a low level of disclosure, with a moderate level in a variation of this style known as conceding. Conceding shows a high tolerance for active involvement in the conflict but less flexibility than yielding. A person will use accommodating conflict styles when he or she is sees that only one disputant will win and that disputant must be Other (Katz & Lawyer, 1992). This represents the opposite perspective from that of competing conflict styles.

4. The problem-solving approach seeks the empowerment of both disputants, and is characterized by high levels of all the other factors that make up conflict styles, with the exception of its level of disclosure, which a person may only express to a moderate degree. When a person adopts a problem-solving conflict style, he or she may be referred to as collaborator as he or she seeks resolutions that fulfill both disputants’ aspirations without any losses (Katz & Lawyer, 1992).

Because conflict styles are techniques people use in their relationships with others to achieve goals, conflict styles change over time, even when a person strongly favors one approach over others and seems to have a limit repertoire for dealing with conflicts. Styles often change over time, as people learn new lessons or have new experiences that change their levels of assertiveness, cooperation, disclosure, feelings of empowerment of the self and of the other, willingness to be active involved in a conflict, and flexibility.

These levels usually change through an awareness of the communication process or the intervention of a third party (Mitchel, 1981). They might also change in response to the interactive nature of conflict as anevolving strategy to meet goals. For instance, a person may engage in an avoidance tactic because further interaction with another person produces tension for which the person may have a very low psychological tolerance. In a more passive manner, unintended disclosure of information about a person’s interests in the conflict may lower that person’s motivation to devote significant resources to maintaining a low level of disclosure and facilitate its conflict style’s transitioning to a style characterized by higher levels of disclosure.

If we can first withdraw ourselves from our negative feelings about conflict and conduct self examination to determine what our own core interests are, then we can then start to reframe how we interact with others in conflict situations to cause shifts in the factors that influence how they approach conflict, with the ultimate goal of encourage both of us to move toward a problem-solving conflict style.

Conflict Management Systems

An organization is a group of elements performing independent actions towards a mutually dependent product. Fritz put forth of model of structural conflict that occurs when competing activities of the organization undermine its ability to produce, describing conditions where a resolution to one tension evokes another tension elsewhere in the system (1996).

Part of the difficulty of identifying structural conflicts for effective intervention, which is clearly within the best interests of the organization, is that members of the organization by definition have challenges escaping their internal understanding of its workings in order to conduct the external assessment necessary to find the ‘joints’ and ‘levers’ that are candidates for treatment.

In their seminal case study on conflict management systems design, Ury, Brett, and Goldberg outlined a model of three basic conflict management systems (1988). Power-based systems are those in which disputants are encouraged, either explicitly or tacitly, toward coercive conflict styles where the conflict is viewed as a zero-sum game and one party gives little attention to the concerns of the other. The parties pit themselves against each other to rectify grievances.

Rights-based systems orient the parties towards external standards, laws, regulations, and other official frameworks for an organization’s operations as the measures by which resolutions may be developed. The parties’ grievances are pitted against recorded guidelines. Interests-based systems explore the needs that parties’ grievances symptomize and develop solutions for the maximum benefit of all involved.

Power- and rights-based systems can lead to detrimental effects on the organization because they frame the conflict as a competition between two parties with few options for turning resolutions to the overall advantage of the organization. The organization becomes the stage on which the conflicts are played out rather than the focus of investment in the parties’ energies.

Interests-based systems, in contrast, deal directly with the underlying causes of the conflict, reflecting the discover of resolutions towards the mutual interests of the parties’ and, as key elements of the organization itself, the organization’s well-being. From this model, Ury el al. and their predecessors have encouraged organizations and conflict management systems designers to analyze which system dominates the conflict management behaviors of an organization’s members and construct pathways towards interests-based mechanisms with a recognition that conflict is an inevitable, though not necessarily inevitably detrimental, aspect of all organizations.

Designing a conflict management system in conjunction with an organization demands an understanding of the organization’s integrated structure through a systems analysis approach.Each part operates in tandem with others, which in sum expend resources and produce outputs. Similar to the laws of biology, organizations develop in response to their external environments. Some are more susceptible to external pressures than others, and often those pressures constitute an existential threat to the organization itself (Silverman, 1970).

And similar to the law of physics, activities within the organization produce tensions that repel and attract its elements. When those tensions overwhelm the ability of the organization to produce outputs, it stagnates or declines under the weight of a decreasing return on energy investments (Fritz, 1996).

All organizations are in a constant state of change. The change may be advancement or oscillation, using the terms of Fritz’ model, but the influences of an evolving external environment, a developing institutional memory, the coming and going of organizational members, the flow of resource inputs and outputs, and other forces do not cease their shaping of the organization, regardless of the appearance of stasis.

Organizations have attachments whose presence marks the place within its life cycle where it currently is. Those attachments should be explicitly incorporated in a system design, either to support the attachments functions of moving the organization into a next stage of growth or to provide space for separation between the organization and attachments, which influence its decline.

The Take Down
Last week you presented to Chief Heaton your assessment of the most likely effects of taking down the El Movi brothel organization. After careful consideration, he has authorized the TPD to prepare a concept of operations for direct action against the organization. Julia has already told us that Angél regularly spends a day at the brothels on a rotating basis, but she does not know his current schedule. Daisy has heard he will be stopping by one of the brothels on Day 1 of Week 8, but she will not know which one until that day.

So, the raid will take place on that day, as soon as they know exactly where he will be. Ideally, Chief Heaton would prefer to arrest Angél Martínez and all the brothel managers without getting anyone hurt. In reality, we are faced with the problem of having to pick whom we will go after and whom we will have to let go for now. Even with JTTF support the TPD cannot take down 17 brothels at once.

Scenario

Daisy has agreed to help with the raid in exchange for immunity from prosecution and enrollment in a city-supported job assistance program. Daisy will not be asked to testify because of her value to counter drug operations and the risk it would pose to her and her family, but mostly due to the fact that she had less information than what Julia Simone can provide to the court.

Daisy will arrange her grocery delivery schedule so that she will be making deliveries to 10 of the brothels on the day of the raid (she cannot reasonably handle any more than that). During the deliveries, she will conduct basic elicitation to determine where Angél will be that day. She will also get a feel for the people in brothel to assess the risks of a raid.

As she leaves each house, an undercover patrol car will be stationed to monitor the comings and goings at the brothels. Between deliveries, Daisy will call her TPD handler to report what she has seen. After she has completed all her deliveries, she will return to a police safe house where she will stay until the raid is over. This last step along with her agreement to have her phone and her home internet monitored between now and the raid were necessary to make sure she does not pose a security risk to the operation and were mandated by the District Attorney’s office as a condition of her immunity. At this point, we seem to have two options:

Option 1

After the TPD has confirmed Daisy’s arrival at the safe house, the undercover officers will call for support. Once the support arrives, they will initiate raids at all 10 of the brothels as closely synchronized as possible to prevent the managers from warning each other. Timing is key here because El Movi’s communications network is one of its strongest security mechanisms. If one of the managers warns the others, then the situation could become dangerous, especially now that we have information the managers have at least one firearm in the house.

Likewise, the Police Commissioner will not authorize going into a house in which a police informant has not been physically present that day without an overwhelming concentration of manpower, especially considering the presence of the brothels victims inside. So if Angél is not in one of the brothels Daisy visits, then the TPD risk his escaping arrest. They will, however, be able to shut down 10 brothels in one fail swoop. The others will likely follow in short time.

Option 2

Once Daisy informs her handler at which brothel Angél will visit, the TPD will converge at that the nearest police station to that location. After the TPD has confirmed Daisy’s arrival at the safe house, they will launch the raid directly on the house where Angél is located. It will be highly likely brothel managers at other locations will be tipped off about the raid, and they will likely flee the city.

Having Angél in custody, however, will be extremely important because he has extensive information about the organization, including its financing (they have to be laundering that money somehow), public corruption (chances are someone in the local government is on Angél’s payroll), human trafficking (we still do not know a lot about the recruitment and transportation methods), and any possible relationships El Movi may have to gangs, drugs rings, or cartels.

Also, we had indications early on that Angél had relationships with independently managed brothels of which we have not found any substantial evidence so far. If they exist, we will probably need his information to locate them, too.