**5.5. Role conflicts**

Role conflicts arise when the conflict parties have different views about areas of responsibility, distribution of tasks and borderlines between formal and informal roles. These conflicts can easily arise if there are many gray zones between roles and uncertainty about routines and competence skills [2–4, 44].

Managers have, in the first instance, a responsibility for creating clear areas of responsibility, as a preventive means of avoiding role conflicts. When such conflicts arise, managers should make sure that there are clear agreements, and that they are accepted by all the conflict parties. Initiatives to change roles can be unpopular among employees who are given limited freedom to do what they want, but managers need to make decisions that benefit the organization.

Role conflicts can easily arise when there are tensions between professional and administrative roles. These role conflicts have become increasingly common in organizations, in the light of modern ideals of economic-administrative management 'from above', and professional pressure from first-line services 'from below' [43–47]. This double pressure can be especially challenging for managers who have to bridge the two worlds: they must understand the roles of those who work on the periphery of the organization while at the same time be sensitive and heedful of centralized pressure. The solution is often to look at distribution of roles in the light of actual competence and to acknowledge that individual employees have different beliefs about areas of responsibilities, depending on where they work in the organization [13, 28].

#### **5.6. Personal conflicts**

Personal conflicts arise when someone perceives others' way of being as unacceptable or provocative. These conflicts are not connected to social roles or interests we strive to fulfill. They concern instead who we are as individuals, the personality traits we have and how we express attitudes [7, 10, 47, 48].

The fact that personal conflicts are rooted not so much in persons' actions as in the persons themselves makes them especially challenging to resolve. Any attempt to encourage the conflict parties to reconsider their way of being can easily be experienced as personal criticism, which in turn creates communicative distance or, in the worst case, complete denial.

Good communication skills are required to resolve personal conflicts. There are four main communication strategies managers can use. A *relational* strategy is to make it clear to the parties how they experience each other. A *confronting* strategy is to make it clear that (and ideally why) some actions are unacceptable. A *pragmatic* strategy is to make it clear to the parties that they must be able to work together even though they do not have very good chemistry. A *functional* strategy is to make it clear that the conflict has unacceptable negative consequences for the functioning of the organization and that the parties must work together in order to ensure that it continues to function.

The choice of which communication strategies to use will depend on the content of the personal conflict and the context in which it arises, but all the strategies can be used to improve interaction if they are adapted wisely to the situation in question. For managers, it is also important to work preventively, by accentuating ideals like respect, openness and equality among employees with idiosyncratic personalities [10, 13]. When many individuals work together, the aim is always to create a shared sense of team commitment among a variety of individuals with unique personality traits.
