Answer

Conflicts as a Tool of Administration

            Human services administrator is a professional who works with people with different feelings, thoughts, ideas, and perspectives on organizational policies to offer human services (Buntz, & Radin, 1983). The key conflict addressed in the novel is lack of understanding of foster parents. Essentially, many parents hardly understand what to expect when staying with a child who they did not sire, especially when there are many guidelines and rules that must be followed. Such parents are unable to curse, whip or do things that the biological parents would adopt to discipline the child. Similarly, foster parents might be doing a great job but they too have siblings who take more parental role in the life of the adopted child. Some of the siblings often use wrong discipline technique. As such, the conflict emerges because the agency misunderstands the entire situation as they feel that the siblings have not attended a parenting training course and therefore should be arrested for offering services they are less experience in (Plocharczyk, 2007).

            As a human service administrator, I would organize appropriate training for all foster parents to identify their qualifications and abilities to work with others. In particular, I would organize for diversity retreats and develop a culture that requires everyone to help one another, other functions, and to establish cross functional opportunities for everyone. Therefore, as a human service administrator, I will have foster parents doing 80% of foster parenting within the agency but 20% of the jobs delegated to either their siblings or those whom they stay with so that the parents can work jointly with these people to understand appropriate discipline methods they can use when.

            In conclusion, conflict is real and it is something that human service administrators must pay attention to. From the novel, it is evident that using conflict as a tool for human services administration is the most appropriate way to increase understanding among workers, staff, professionals or members of a given organization. Conflict emanates because people do not know much about one another and hardly understand the origins of such disputes, their challenges and positions among others things (Hitt, Miller, & Colella, 2011). Therefore, as an administration tool, conflict enables human service professionals to come down to listening and communicating with one another regarding relationships resolving the differences and improving productivity amongst them.