How Individuals Conceptualize Conflict: Identification of Steps in the Process and the Role of Personal/Developmental Factors

In: Human relations: towards the integration of the social sciences, Volume 30, Issue 5, p. 451-467

Abstract

Organizational conflict management has tended to emphasize the effects of another party's behavior and of background conditions upon an individual's conflict behavior, implicitly treating conflict parties mechanistically as interchangeable responders to conflict stimuli. In contrast, this paper highlights individual differences as significant factors in conflict management. Drawing upon the more humanistic and clinical psychological literatures, the present paper develops a conceptual framework of the process through which an individual conceptualizes conflict and the impact of personal/developmental variables upon conceptualization. The model was developed using methods of grounded theory generation. Stages in the conceptualization process were found to be: experience symbolization, causal attribution, intentional attribution, context analysis, content analysis, and choice assessment. Individual differences act as perceptual screens and can trigger distortional defenses at each stage in the processing of a conflict stimulus. The model offers a method of analyzing the effect of individual differences during conflict. Implications for intervention strategies and training of third parties are examined, and future research directions are suggested.