Mathematical Principals in Business Situations

Mathematical Principles in Business Situations

Mathematical Principles in Business Situations

Conflicts usually caused by opposing interests of at least two parties. Parties can be the individuals or intercontinental business groups and companies. In any cases, there are some universal patterns of conflicts (Wertheim, 1996) between them: competition over resources, ambiguity over responsibility and authority, differences in perceptions, work styles, attitudes, communication problems, interdependence between individuals and groups, contradictory reward and incentive systems, different goals due to division of labor. Tull (2004) proposed the “12 steps” methodology for personal conflict management and resolution.

Thomas, and Kilmann (1974) proposed five principles of responding to any conflicts: Competition, or distributive (win-lose) bargaining, when own needs is important, but the other's needs is not; Collaboration, or integrative (win-win) bargaining, when both parties’ needs are important; Compromising, when satisfying both parties’ needs are moderately important; Avoiding, when party is indifferent about either own or the other's needs (no action); Accommodating, when it doesn't matter to you and it matters to the other party. These principles are represented in Fig. 1 with two coordinates: assertiveness and cooperation.

[pic]

Fig. 1. Conflict Management Styles

Another classification of conflicts was proposed by the U.S. Air Forces Colonel John Boyd (1986), who analysed military history and formulated three kinds of human conflict: Attrition warfare, Maneuver conflict, and Moral conflict. He proposed commonly known and widely used the observation-orientation-decision-action process (OODA loop), which represents, what is happening during the command and control process (Coram, 2001).

Success in business, as in any real-time competitive process, depends upon the ability to perform a series of steps or a cycle faster than...