When people work together in an office environment it is inevitable for conflict to take place, but luckily there are many guidelines to follow.
Before we can start with guidelines to resolve the problem, we should first understand why conflict occurs. Reasons might be:

• POOR COMMUNICATION
As South Africa has 11 different languages, it should be accepted that conflict can arise as miscommunication can take place. Therefore one should always make sure that you understand what the other party is trying to saying.

• DIFFERENCE IN PERSONALITIES
There are 16 different personality types therefore it is understandable that not everyone in the office will get along.

• DIFFERENT CULTURES
South Africa is culturally diverse and it is of importance to understand and learn about other cultures in order to avoid offending a colleague.

• DIFFERENT VALUES
As office environments have employees of different ages, it could cause conflict when the different generations cannot accept each other’s values.

• COMPETITION
When commission is linked to employee production, a workplace may experience competition between employees, as some sales representatives will try to take other representatives clients.

• HARASSMENT
This could be sexual or racial harassment and verbal or physical abuse.

These are a few of the reasons why conflict occurs in the workplace, but at the end of the day it comes down to respecting your fellow colleagues, and to think before you speak. In our next blog post we will discuss the guidelines of conflict resolution.