Conflict Management and Knowledge Sharing in Higher Education: Building Blocks for An Impactful Team

In today’s world of extreme competition, knowledge sharing has become a necessity. It enables innovation and learning at work. Knowledge sharing refers to bringing forth all the relevant knowledge to employees within the organization to attain individual level, team level, and organizational level innovation. Teams are a reliable source of innovation. A good team may harness the adaptability of the organization to constantly changing environments, much more than what an individual working alone could do. To inculcate creativity and build up problem-solving competence among teammates, knowledge sharing is the key. But the fact that knowledge generation and storage is within the employees makes knowledge sharing a difficult task. There are high chances of conflicts acting as barriers to knowledge dissemination. Functional conflicts must be encouraged; however, Dysfunctional conflicts need to be checked. We propose that inculcating factors such as quotidian knowledge incorporation in business strategy and channelizing the attitudes and behaviors of employees towards consistent sharing of knowledge by regulating workplace conflicts can help a firm in successfully promoting the culture of knowledge sharing. Hence this chapter aims to provide deeper insights into conflict reduction through a conceptual framework so that more knowledge sharing could be stimulated in higher education institutions (HEIs). The other focus is to determine the relationship between various sources and types of conflicts such as task conflicts, relationship conflicts, team learning, and team performance and build a conceptual framework for the same. It also intends to bring forth the role of Knowledge Oriented Leadership (KOL) in controlling conflicts.