WMBA 6501 Week 8 Handling Disagreement Synthesis Example

Ask Before Conceding, Name the Pattern, Let People Keep Their Rules: How a Purchasing Manager Will Handle Disagreement From a Role With Authority, Argued From Seven Weeks of Conflict and Negotiation Exercises

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6501: Conflict Management and Negotiation

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Ask Before Conceding, Name the Pattern, Let People Keep Their Rules: How a Purchasing Manager Will Handle Disagreement From a Role With Authority, Argued From Seven Weeks of Conflict and Negotiation Exercises

The Position

In January I will become purchasing director at Linden Fastener Supply, the course's invented fastener wholesaler, with three buyers reporting to me and a seat in the meetings where branch, sales and warehouse disputes are settled. My position after this term is that a manager with authority handles disagreement best by doing three things: asking before conceding or deciding, naming the pattern a conflict has fallen into rather than ruling on its latest episode, and letting the people who must live with a rule help write it. Each commitment comes from something the term's exercises showed me, sometimes by my own mistakes.

Ask Before Conceding or Deciding

The clearest lesson came from the Week 7 role-play. I opened well and held my limits, but I traded away my most valued issue, lead time, in the first fifteen minutes, before asking what the other side valued most. Had I asked which issues mattered to Calumet this year, I would have learned that volume mattered more to them than price and could have bought the lead time with it. Fisher et al. (2011) urged negotiators to explore interests before committing to positions, and I had written that advice into my plan in Week 4 and then skipped it under time pressure.

The same failure appears in a manager's daily work. When two people bring a dispute to someone with authority, the temptation is to decide quickly, because deciding feels like leadership and the clock is running. In the Week 1 will-call dispute, the useful information, late-afternoon orders carried the highest margins and were also causing late shipments to two plant customers, emerged only because the two managers argued long enough to put their data on the table. A quick ruling would have missed it. As a director, I will ask each side what it knows that the other does not before saying anything about the outcome.

Name the Pattern, Not the Episode

The Week 2 diagnosis showed a pattern that a single ruling could not fix. The plant supervisor's dominating style and our coordinator's obliging style produced quick settlements that left the cause, an uncommunicated model change, untouched, and pushed the coordinator toward avoiding. Rahim (1983) described these styles as recurring ways of handling conflict, and the case showed them reinforcing each other. Resolving each stockout separately would have looked like progress while the pattern continued.

With authority, I will be in a position to see patterns that the people inside a dispute cannot. When the same two parties keep returning with different versions of the same complaint, I will say so explicitly, describe the pattern without blame and ask what would break it. In the stockout case, the break was simple: the plant needed to share engineering changes, and our coordinator needed backing to ask for them.

Let People Keep Their Rules

The Week 6 memo chose mediation over a ruling for the branch transfer dispute, and the reasoning applies far beyond that case. Karambayya and Brett (1989) reported that parties to a dispute judged its resolution more just when they retained a say in the outcome, and a rule the branch managers helped write is more likely to survive than one imposed on them. The Grand Rapids manager's habit of marking parts "unavailable" was itself evidence of what happens when people feel a rule was done to them.

This commitment has limits. Some disputes need a decision, for example when customers are being harmed or when the parties have stopped dealing in good faith. The Week 6 plan included a deadline after which the vice president would decide, and I will keep that structure: help the parties write their own rule, with a date after which I will write it for them. The deadline is part of what makes the invitation credible.

What I Will Use Power For

Week 5 changed how I think about my own authority. Emerson (1962) defined power as the other party's dependence, and a director's power over buyers is largely their dependence on my approval, their assignments and their reviews. The power analysis also showed that using power is defensible only when the threat is real, proportionate and offered as information rather than as an ultimatum. With my own team, that means I will tell people plainly what I will do if a disagreement is not resolved, and I will not imply consequences I do not intend.

Where the Commitments Pull Against Each Other

The three commitments do not always fit together. Asking before deciding takes time, and some disputes, such as a customer's line about to stop, need a decision within the hour. Letting people write their own rules can preserve the very pattern I mean to name, if the parties agree on a rule that suits them and shifts the cost onto someone outside the room, as the plant and our coordinator effectively did with the doubled minimums. When the commitments conflict, I will choose in this order: protect customers and safety first, name the pattern second and invite the parties to write the rule third. Fisher et al. (2011) treat objective criteria as a way to settle disagreements on their merits, and I will ask any rule the parties write to meet such criteria, including its cost to the people who were not part of the dispute.

What Would Show the Commitments Are Working

I will judge myself by three signs over my first six months: whether disputes brought to me end with a rule the parties wrote, whether the same disputes stop returning and whether my buyers bring disagreements to me early rather than after they have hardened. If disputes keep returning, I will have been ruling on episodes rather than naming patterns, and I will need to change. I will also ask one buyer each quarter, in a short conversation without a form, whether there is a disagreement on the team that has not reached me, because the absence of complaints may only mean that people have stopped raising them.

References

Emerson, R. M. (1962). Power-dependence relations. American Sociological Review, 27(1), 31-41. https://doi.org/10.2307/2089716

Fisher, R., Ury, W., & Patton, B. (2011). Getting to yes: Negotiating agreement without giving in (3rd ed.). Penguin Books.

Karambayya, R., & Brett, J. M. (1989). Managers handling disputes: Third-party roles and perceptions of fairness. Academy of Management Journal, 32(4), 687-704. https://doi.org/10.2307/256564

Rahim, M. A. (1983). A measure of styles of handling interpersonal conflict. Academy of Management Journal, 26(2), 368-376. https://doi.org/10.2307/255985