Reference no: EM132226590

Give opinion:

Working in sales often times presents conflict and communication breakdowns. One distinct and common form of conflict within my organization is generated by competition. Competition becomes a catalyst when representatives are striving to perform their very best at getting the most in sales. We are even ranked and quantified through what is known as a “Rep Ranker". This ranker is emailed out weekly, and across the entire company and makes competition become very intense. So intense that sometimes people can go against company policy, proper procedure, and ethical code when it comes to making sales and tending to the overall customer experience. One distinct example of this would be when a representative takes a sale from his coworker. In short, the worker knowingly assisted a customer of another coworker and completed the sale with sales codes linked to him. The ironic part happens when that representatives walk in as both parties are completing the exchange. No exchange took place right then, however, once completed the reps encountered each other in the back office and verbal combat ensued. According to the text, Management Communications by David Baack, this would be considered an" interpersonal face-to-face conflict". Within this face-to-face encounter, personality and passion presented itself through emotion and hinders the flow of communication among these two individuals. The only solution was to mediate and rectify the transaction based on proper facts. At the same time showing different alternatives on how they could have worked out their differences as a team. We all agreed that the sale should go to the original representative and their differences were discussed and they agreed to move forward. I also asked if they knew how the commission structured worked and if they knew they could do split deals on the register. Both responded no. This soon became a functional conflict and presented a great teaching opportunity to not only show my team how to approach situations like this, but I was also able to promote team selling as a way of satisfying staff and still focusing on the overall goal of the company. (Baack 2012) states “functional conflict serves the organization's interests in some way. An example of functional conflict would be one in which improvement in performance or greater cooperation among individuals or groups takes place(sec 7.4).