Managing Conflict

• From the “Conflict Handling Styles” exercise, determine the styles with which you are most comfortable and discuss how these style preferences would most likely impact leadership and team behaviors of a team you manage (or expect to manage in the future). Include discussion on the pros and cons of your preferences.
After completion of the “Conflict Handling Styles” exercise, I scored the highest score in the collaborating style which was 39. Collaborating is a process where two or more people or organizations work together in order to achieve shared goals.
Implementing collaboration strategies properly has proved to be an empowering asset because it helps you and your shareholders achieve your goals in an easier and more efficient way. Of course like any other organization process, there are advantages and disadvantages to collaboration in the workplace but we should put an accurate plans and commitments to avoid those conflicts from happening.
Advantages:
• One of the advantages of collaborative efforts in the workplace is that the work is distributed over all the team members so no member feel that he is loaded with too much work more than the others.
• Every member knows what the work he has to do in order to continue the workflow, so that improves quality, productivity and efficiency.
• Expands your networking and contacts.
• Saves time, the division of labor leads to a much better time performance regarding common and individual tasks and goals.
• Greater creative input that raise the visibility and quality of the products or services offered by your company.
• Encourages trust and participation among the stakeholders and engages them on tasks and goals accomplishment.
Disadvantages:
• Conflicts in working styles would appear when group of different people work together on one project.
• If not having a studied strategy and plan everything will fall apart starting from workflow to goals.
• Having a proper human resources management is a must, if communication fails, the whole process will be affected.
• You need to share important information with your teams and colleagues; there is always a risk that someone chooses to give up.
• Having a collaborative group would sometimes end up with too many people trying to lead the group.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-collaboration-workplace-20965.html
http://www.collaborationideas.com/2010/11/collaboration-pros-and-cons/