Managing Change

6‐1Implementing Cooperation within a Group

How Conflicts and Confrontation Are Born in a Group

Cooperation and communication between departments or divisions can be quite a difficult topic. In most organizations, there is a wall between different departments and divisions, and more often than not they do not share information and cooperate.

An even more difficult situation is when certain departments or divisions get along badly. In the story of this book, there was a conflict between the engineers and the sales personnel. You will often hear about conflicts and confrontations between different groups in a company like between the sales and development departments, between divisions in the development department, or between HR and field personnel.

There are cases when conflict between groups is caused by actual communication or action, but there are also cases when it's caused by perceptions based on speculation and assumption.

For example, in this book's story, one of the opinions in the hearing results was that there are engineers who felt like sales personnel were looking down on them. It's likely that this feeling was caused by something that a sales employee did (like cutting an engineer off, saying they're busy). However, on top of this initial encounter, there is also the matter of how this encounter is interpreted, perceived, and talked about between the engineers.