Describe two different conflict situations that you are familiar with or have experienced. Explain various conflict-management techniques that are used by police managers to manage conflict. Which techniques
used by police managers could have been used in the two examples that you gave? Why would those techniques have been effective?
The conflicts that I experienced were based upon power, status, and culture. The situation was power and the desire to get promoted at any costs. There were situations where people would stab each other in the back, to increase their chances of being promoted. This resulted in the unit creating a primal mentality amongst the lower-level members, fighting for personal gain. At times, people would try to find out activities each other were engaged in, just so they could one-up each other. Another conflict that I experienced involved culture. The perception of someone being aggressive because of their ethnicity became a serious conflict because people made terrible assumptions and spread rumors without getting to know someone. This led to leadership only taking the side of those individuals who complained and the removal of a well knowledgeable and respected person from their position.
There are various conflict management techniques that are used by police managers to manage conflicts. A few techniques are avoidance, dominance, soothing, and compromise (Vito, Reed, & More) Avoidance is the most common method of addressing conflict, it’s the act of avoiding the situation and pretending it doesn’t exist in hopes the problem would resolve itself. Dominance is technique used to force others to cease. This technique is commonly used to make quick decisions; however, it doesn’t get to the root cause of the issue (Vito, Reed, & More) Soothing is a technique used to calm down a dysfunctional conflict amongst conflicting parties, and compromise consist of mutual trading offers or negotiations between two parties to find an acceptable middle ground. (Vito, Reed, & More)
For the first conflict, I believe dominance and compromising would have worked amongst the lower-level
members. Compromise by giving each person an opportunity to promote through leadership opportunities. By utilizing dominance to stop the behavior immediately. Agencies are a team-based organization, and if they can’t work as a team then they don’t belong in the agency.
The second conflict, I believe soothing, and dominance should have been used to handle the issue of judging someone based upon their cultural background. I would use the dominance technique to stop the rumor mill immediately because there is zero tolerance for that behavior. Finally, I believe soothing would help each conflicting side understand one another and their intentions.
