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CMI Assignment Help > Blog > CMI Level 5 > CMI 510 Assignment Example

CMI 510 Assignment Example

  • November 20, 2024
  • Posted by: Scarlett
  • Category: CMI Level 5
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CMI 510 Assignment Example

Managing conflict requires resilience and the ability to assess complex information, make informed decisions, and act professionally within the limits of organisational and legal frameworks. The CMI 510 assessment brief is designed to provide learners with strategies to manage conflict confidently, find creative solutions, and make tough decisions.

Brackenmoor Veterinary Group operates 42 small animal practices across the South and West of England, employing 890 people including veterinary surgeons, registered veterinary nurses, patient care assistants and client care teams. The group has grown by acquiring independent practices, 14 of them in the past three years, and is midway through standardising clinical protocols and pricing across the estate. The author is Regional Clinical Services Manager for 11 practices. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.

Introduction

Veterinary practice concentrates several conditions known to generate conflict: professional autonomy meeting corporate standardisation, emotionally demanding work, acute clinical hierarchy, and a workforce with strong professional identity working in very small teams. Adding acquisition to that mix, where founding partners become employees of a group whose protocols they did not write, produces predictable friction. This assignment analyses the types, causes and stages of conflict and its performance impact, discusses investigation processes, and examines the capabilities and techniques required to manage it.

Task 1: Report on the types, causes, stages and impact of conflict

AC 1.1 Analyse types and causes of conflict within organisations

Types by level. Intrapersonal conflict occurs within an individual facing incompatible demands, which at Brackenmoor is common where a veterinary surgeon’s professional judgement about a treatment plan meets a client’s financial constraint. Interpersonal conflict arises between two people. Intragroup conflict occurs within a practice team. Intergroup conflict occurs between professional groups, most visibly between clinical and client care staff over appointment scheduling. Inter-organisational conflict arises between the group and referral centres, insurers or suppliers.

Analysing the value of this classification, level determines the intervention point. An intergroup conflict between vets and nurses across several practices is being sustained by professional norms and status, and resolving it practice by practice will not work because the cause is not local.

Types by content. Task conflict concerns the substance of the work, such as disagreement over a clinical protocol. Relationship conflict concerns interpersonal antipathy. Process conflict concerns how work is allocated and sequenced. Analysing their differing consequences, task conflict about clinical approach is legitimate professional debate and can improve care, whereas relationship conflict is consistently corrosive, and the two are frequently confused because a protocol disagreement is often the socially acceptable expression of a personal one.

Causes. Structural causes include role boundary ambiguity between veterinary surgeons and registered veterinary nurses over the limits of Schedule 3 procedures, acute interdependence in small teams where one person’s pace determines another’s, and resource scarcity in consulting room and theatre time. Change is a substantial cause here: acquisition alters status, autonomy and identity, and former practice owners who now report to a regional manager experience a loss that presents as resistance to protocol.

Competing objectives contribute directly, since clinical staff are oriented to animal welfare and the group to margin, and these diverge at the point where a treatment is clinically preferable and commercially marginal. Interpersonal and contextual causes include communication style, emotional exhaustion and the moral distress associated with euthanasia decisions and with clients unable to fund treatment. Analysing causes collectively, conflict at Brackenmoor is predominantly structural and identity-based rather than personal. Treating it as personality difficulty, and moving individuals between practices,

es, relocates the conflict without reducing it. AC 1.2 Analyse the stages of conflict Glasl’s model describes nine stages of escalation grouped into three phases, and its distinctive contribution is that it treats escalation as a process with identifiable thresholds rather than as a matter of degree. Phase one, in which both parties can still win. Stage one is hardening, where positions form but the parties still believe discussion will resolve matters. Stage two is debate and polemic, where argument becomes tactical and each side seeks to convince observers. Stage three is action replacing talk, where the parties stop discussing and start doing, such as a vet simply ignoring the protocol rather than continuing to argue about it. Analysing the significance of this phase, resolution here is achievable by the parties themselves with light managerial facilitation. Phase two, in which one party must lose. Stage four is the formation of coalitions and concern with image, where colleagues are recruited to a side. Stage five is loss of face, where the dispute becomes about the other party’s character and moral standing. Stage six is strategies of threat. Analysing the change across this threshold, the dispute has ceased to be about the original issue, and the parties can no longer resolve it unaided; third-party involvement becomes necessary. Phase three, in which both parties lose. Stages seven, eight and nine involve limited destructive blows, fragmentation of t...

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