EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF CONFLICT MANAGEMENT ON EMPLOYEE ATTRITION IN SELECTED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANISATIONS

Transcription

1 EXPLORING THE IMPACT OF CONFLICT MANAGEMENT ON EMPLOYEE ATTRITION IN SELECTED INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ORGANISATIONS SYNOPSIS OF PROPOSED RESEARCH WORK IN THE DEPARTMENT OF PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT AND INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS (FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE) PATNA UNIVERSITY PATNA Signature of Supervisor (Dr. Raj Luxmi) Signature of Candidate (Supriya Krishnan) University Professor & Head Department of Economics Patna University, Patna

2 INTRODUCTION A business organization is an individual or group of people that collaborate to achieve certain commercial goals (Richand and Langlois, 1993). Conflict is a common part of organizational relationships as people work together for more than 40 hours per week; conflict is likely to arise between different parties. Conflict is the interactive process manifested in incompatibility, disagreement, or dissonance within or between social entities, in terms of interest, principle and goal. In fact, human resource managers report spending 24 to 60 percent of their time managing employee disputes (Church and Marks, 2001). Conflict management is the process of limiting the negative aspects of conflict while increasing the positive aspects of conflict. The aim of conflict management is to enhance group outcomes, including effectiveness or performance in organizational setting (Rahim, 2002; Bodtker and Jameson, 2001). It is important to have a conflict resolution strategy as it can affect the profitability and sustainability of the business if not managed properly (Rahim, 2002). A study conducted by CPP, Inc. on industry leaders in research, training and organizational development tools showed that employee s average spending of 2.8 hours per week involved in some type of workplace- conflict. It results in employee s attrition besides lost productivity and organization s profitability. Attrition refers to a gradual, natural reduction in membership or personnel, as through retirement, resignation or death (Godard and John, 2000). It results in loss of talents, the cost of training the new recruits and adversely affects the productivity of the organization. Therefore, it is extremely important to curb the attrition. NEED OF THE RESEARCH Most of the researches in the business sector have addressed only specific problems related to its environmental analysis like challenges, growth and opportunities, the problem of attrition, the HRM systems and issues of job stress, job satisfaction, individual performance etc. (Sharma, 2009) but not much inclusive and structured work has been done in the context of conflict management (Varriale et al. Page 2 of 6

3 2004). Literature review has also shown that various researchers have identified myriad of reasons behind the escalating problem of attrition and many of them have even suggested recommendations to combat it (Joshi 2004). Many researchers have also worked on various domains like the HRM systems and practices (Budhwar et al. 2006; Sharma 2009; Kanwar et al. 2008). However, no systematic and comprehensive work has been found that collaborates all the facets viz. attrition, retention and conflict management to combat the most smouldering problem of the present times i.e. attrition. Thus, different set of factors emerged for attrition and retention respectively. The need for this study can be clearly defined in two points: 1. Attrition is a burning problem for the business sector, especially, because it fails to tap the full utilization of the human resources and wastes much of its time, money and resources due to this. 2. Dearth of conflict management strategy is responsible for the attrition in business organization. AIM AND OBJECTIVES Thus, this research will aim to produce a model for employee retention conjoining it with other aspects of conflict management interventions viz, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, competing and collaborating. The broad objective of this study is to identify the root causes of attrition in business organization meanwhile, generating a model for maximizing retention of employees in the organization and surface with concrete recommendations, which will eventually be valuable to the organizations to retain their employees for a long term. The specific objectives of this thesis are: 1. To identify and rank the factors of attrition in business organization based on accumulative literature review and secondary data. Page 3 of 6

4 2. To explore and analyze the nexus of conflict management with employee s retention and attrition in business organization based on primary data collected from field survey. 3. To develop a regression model for escalating the stay of employees in business organization and give recommendations for the same. 4. To assess the existing level of employee s conflict resolution and validate the model by studying the impact of recommendations on a small patch. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY A systematic and organized methodology will be obtained for the research study. A survey design will be used to obtain the required information. The population for this study comprised of employees working in various business organizations in India. A sample size of about 200 or more will be chosen for this study. Simple random sampling technique will be used to gather data from the respondents. For this, respondents diverged from every age group, gender, organization, marital status etc, but would be restricted only to managerial level, which are responsible for making strategies regarding conflict management. A questionnaire will be intricately designed so that we can determine how effective the provisions for managing conflict in the organization are. The information would also be gathered about the factors responsible for attrition, the factors that can be employed to retain the employees in an organization and their overall level of satisfaction with conflict management interventions. SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY The significance of the study lies in the detonation of the business organization in the recent years. Where, on one hand the sector is growing with leaps and bounds, on the other, the conflict is also increasing tremendously resulting in employee turnover (Figure 1). The study is also an attempt to assess the dimensions of conflict management for employee s retention in an organization. It will be significant for academicians as well as professionals who can exploit it to control the employee turnover. This will also serve as a guideline to make provisions regarding Page 4 of 6

5 management of conflict as it has far reaching impact on employee s productivity and organizational productivity at large. The organisation s overall goals of increasing employee retention and reducing employee turnover expenses can be successfully achieved by implementing a workplace conflict resolution system, even when no obvious conflict is present. What cost the organisation mere cents per employee to implement can save tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary recruitment costs and lost productivity and invaluable expertise cannot be lost to competitors. The direct correlation between the investment and the result may be more difficult to track and take a little longer to achieve but, long-term solutions create deep and long-term results. Page 5 of 6

6 REFERENCES 1. Bodtker, A. M., and Jameson, J. K. (2001). Emotion in conflict formation and its transformation: Application to organizational conflict management. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 3: Budhwar, P., Luthar, H. and Bhatnagar, J. (2006). The Dynamics of HRM Systems in Indian BPO Firms. Journal of Labour Research Vol. XXVII, No De Church, L. A., and Marks, M. A. (2001). Maximizing the benefits of task conflict: The role of conflict management. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 12: Godard, J., and John T. D. (2000). Reflections on the high performance paradigm s implications for industrial relations as a field: Industrial and Labour Relations Review, 53: Joshi, R. (2004). Innovative Retention Strategies for Indian BPO s (Part One), Cite HR Human Resource Management Community, available at last accesses on February 11, Kanwar, Y. P. S., Singh, A. K., and Kodwani, A. D. (2009). Work-life Balance and Burnout as Predictors of Job Satisfaction in the IT-ITES Industry, Vision- The Journal of Business Perspective, Vol. 13, No. 2, April-June, pp Leah Walling. (2008). New study details both crippling and beneficial effects of workplace conflict on businesses. CPP, Inc. (800) Luisa Varriale, Paola Briganti, Rosaria La Peruta, Maria Ferrara. (2014). Organizational Conflict and Knowledge Creation. International Journal of Information Systems in the Service Sector. 4: 4, Rahim, M. A. (2002). Towards a theory of managing organizational conflict. The International Journal of Conflict Management, 13: Richand N. L., Paul L. R. (1993). Business Organization as a Coordination Problem: Towards a Dynamic Theory of the Boundaries of the Firm. Page 6 of 6