creative conflict?

"confronting others in ways that produce growth"

There is a particular episode of the "The Office" called "Conflict Resolution" which I think would be a perfect example of all of the things that you are not supposed to do when it comes to mediating conflicts between other people. The general background to the episode is that it is a typical office where employees will have complaints about their fellow co-workers that they will submit to their HR representative. When the boss, Michael Scott, who, although is a very caring person, is also very immature and injudicious individual, decides to solve his employee's conflicts, it ends up to be a negotiation nightmare.

One of the main conflicts that he "negotiates", while it would be an excellent example of creative conflict, it unfortunately satisfies neither of the two parties. The two fueding parties, both accountants, Oscar and Angela, are arguing over a poster Angela has on the wall that Oscar dislikes seeing. In order to achieve a perfect, "win-win-win" solution (a solution where both parties and the mediator win), Michael suggests that Angela make the poster into a t-shirt that Oscar wears. While this is a very creative solution to the problem, perhaps a better one than the secretary Pam's idea of a compromise of having it up Tuesdays and Thursdays, it really didn't satisfy either Oscar or Angela.

Continuing with his quest, the boss Michael, furthur stirs up controversy when he forces additional fueding parties to meet with each other to "resolve" their conflicts. The problem would this would be that neither party had come willing to meet with each other and therefore were not ready to meet, nor were they coming with a willing heart to compromise to find a solution. The end of the day resulted in several employees mad at each other because controversy had been stirred up without a proper plan of action for a resolution. So, basically, I think that this would all be an excellent example of what not to do when it comes to mediating a conflict between a group of other people.