Departmental rivalry – The managers of Tesco’s human resource department have the extremely difficult job of deciding which areas of the business gets the benefits of staff training and development. But these benefits for the different departments of Tesco are limited therefore some departments miss out thus causing major conflict between all the departmental managers. Human resources may wish to give staff extra training to improve their performance yet this will cost money and the finance department may disagree because they do not want to fund it.
Research and development may want to launch a new product that has been developed therefore they may want more staff on hand, Human Resources will then have the responsibility of recruiting more staff and may disagree with the launch process. The distribution department may require more staff working in a specific department or feel that lack of staff motivation in this area, therefore Human Resources will have the responsibility of boosting morale and there could be a disagreement.
Human resources- may conflict with other areas such as administration, marketing and the finance department, research and development, and distribution. Human resources may want to appeal to a larger segment of society giving Tesco a larger and better reputation encouraging people to want to work for the organisation through advertising in more upmarket locations or increasing the advertisements in more newspapers.
Marketing may disagree at this because it will increase their expenditure and the theory may not be successful due to bad advertising or too much advertising which will bore the consumer, they also may not recruit appropriately. Marketing need Human Resources for Recruitment and Selection, they may want more employees who are specialists in marketing and human resources may disagree as they are too expensive. Training and development may want staff to have additional training, which is off the job, which is very expensive per person, Human Resources may disagree.
Marketing may launch a new product and may need more staff, no planning ahs been put into it, human resource will have to either hire experts or pay to train, both expensive. Human resources may conflict with sales because if they are low then they will have to make employees redundant. When Tesco open a store it is a struggle to hire a large amount of staff and keep them within the company, this means their might be conflict between recruitment and selection and finance on the amount of expenditure.
The staff working within customer services may not have very much experience and therefore may need training from Training and development, this will cost money and may de-motivate staff who have to help staff that are less experienced, they may feel that further training may benefit their job role, and may result in feeling neglected or resented by Tesco. Theory X and Theory Y – The managers of Tesco are at the forefront of potential conflict within the business. Many managers of any organisation may wish to believe that Douglas McGregor’s Theory X is the correct one to go by but others may argue that Theory Y is.
This can cause managers to argue whether the employees of the business should be given more responsibility or whether they should be told what to do, how to do it and to do it in a certain amount of time. Appraisal – This is the most common cause of conflict in any large or medium sized business including that of Tesco. Employees sometimes wish to be left alone to get on with their job instead of being told how good they are at doing it (they may feel like they have someone behind their shoulder keeping an eye on them all the time).
Therefore such employees will be against the idea of an appraisal system in the organisation. There is always the potential for conflict in Tesco whether an appraisal system is in use at the company. Employees may feel that they are working much harder than what the manger(s) recognises and may feel like they deserve more appraisal causing disputes and disagreements. Also other kinds of disputes may tend towards that of favouritism or victimisation. Staff workers of Tesco could be jealous of those who may look to be favoured by the employer(s) and could feel victimised due to a lack of attention.
