Park & Antonioni's (2007) article "Personality, reciprocity, and strength of conflict resolution strategy" investigated how an individual's conflict resolution behavior was affected by an assessment of their personality by way of the Big 5 personality assessment and situational factors. The article builds on the generally accepted notion that how a person behaves is a function of both their personality and their environment, so to understand how a person will interact in a conflict, both these factors need to be understood. For the purposes of this class blog, I am exploring the personality dimensions and how they may be related to conflict management strategies.
The authors state that a person's personality will have an affect on the choice of conflict strategy they are likely to use (Park & Antonioni, 2007). The Big 5 personality assessment uses five measures to evaluate an individual's personality.
1. Agreeableness measures whether a person demonstrates warm, generous, trusting, and cooperative behaviors. Persons characterized as agreeable have a strong motivation to maintain positive relationships with others.
2. Extraversion measures an individual's sociability, assertiveness, and positive emotionality. Persons characterized as highly extraverted are said to be highly motivated by rewards of various kinds, including winning in competitive situations.
3. Neuroticism measures anxiety, emotional instability, easy embarrassment, and depression. Persons characterized by neuroticism show a heightened sensitivity to punishment cues and negative events.
4. Conscientiousness measures industriousness, discipline, and responsibility. Persons characterized as demonstrating conscientiousness as a trait are strongly motivated by achievement and a high integrity.
5. Openness (to experience) measures associations with being imaginative, adventurous, original, and thoughtful. In addition, the need for variety and novelty is seen in this type. Persons measuring high in openness appear to be able to access and process more thoughts, feelings, and impulses and are motivated to seek out new and varied experiences.
Integration
Conflict resolution strategies can be understood as occurring within two overarching dimensions. The first being a person's concern for meeting their own interests and the second being a concern for meeting the interests of the other party in the conflict. Within these two primary distinctions, subsets have been defined in order to better understand specific conflict resolution styles. Park & Antonioni (2007) chose to explore the four best researched strategies and connect these styles with the traits associated with the Big 5 personality assessment.
1. Competing/Dominating strategy is exemplified by an individual's attempt to satisfy their own concerns at the expense of the other. Persons testing high in extraversion are more likely to use a competing style, which is a reflection of their desire to attain rewards. Neuroticism is also associated with a competing style due to a tendency for neurotic personalities to react negatively (often by "attacking" the other party) to interpersonal conflicts. Finally, persons rating as highly conscientious may also incorporate a competing style due to their motivation to achieve.
2. Accommodating strategy is characterized by a person's lack of satisfying their own concerns in order to satisfy those of the other party. Persons testing high in agreeableness would tend to conform to the demands of others in conflict situations. In addition, persons high in openness to experience would tend to be more receptive to the perspective of other parties in a conflict and, therefore, more accommodating.
3. Collaborating strategy is characterized by an effort to resolve a conflict in a win-win manner. Persons who rate higher on agreeableness, because of having an active concern for the welfare of others, would tend to use a more collaborative approach to conflict. Extraverts have a strong tendency toward sociability, which requires some amount of an ability to collaborate. In addition, extraverts are show little apprehension toward direct communication techniques, which should result in an increased willingness to share information. This willingness to share information should increase the likelihood of developing win-win situations. Because of the tendency of a person testing high in conscientiousness to value high integrity, a collaborating style may allow for both parties to satisfy their own concerns without coming at the expense of the other. Finally, those who are more open to experience should better be able to see and overcome inherent biases that could undermine conflict resolution strategies and also see novel opportunities for collaborative possibilities that others may miss.
4. Avoiding strategy is allows events to take their own course and often results in lose-lose outcomes in conflicts. Persons rating high in agreeableness are likely to avoid conflicts due to their high concern for the welfare of others. Because of the emotional stability often required to effectively interact in conflict situations, those persons testing high in neuroticism are more likely to avoid these interactions completely.
Note: I have, for the purposes of brevity (which I may have failed at anyway!), chose to only explore the "positively" associated aspects of these personality and conflict style interactions. Obviously, there would be negative associations, as well. For instance, it would be easy to see how agreeableness would be negatively associated (correlated) with a competing conflict style.
Application
The application of assessing personality variables in conflict resolution strategies could play an important role in helping parties understand the style of negotiation that will likely play out during an attempt at negotiating a satisfactory settlement between two parties. Park & Antonioni (2007) have taken a step in this effort by exploring the relationships between the Big 5 personality assessment and four styles of conflict interaction. While situational factors and reciprocal norms will clearly affect how such interactions play out in the real world, the effort to understand what personality factors drive how a person is likely to approach a conflict should be an area of productive research.
Knowing something about how a person sees the world offers an opportunity to approach a conflict negotiation in a more sensitive and productive manner. Knowledge of such factors could lead to avoiding unnecessary confrontations that may inhibit otherwise fruitful dialog. On the other hand, caution needs to be taken when applying a label to another person. While personality factors may capture certain overall traits and characteristics of an individual, human beings are highly complex and dynamic entities. Any attempt to narrowly define a human being by a simple and reductionistic methodology threatens to undermine a nuanced and humanistic understanding of personhood and its inherent potentials. We may be driven and informed by a relatively consistent set of traits that have evolved over a lifetime, but we are also incredibly adaptive and capable of transformations that elude easy categorizations and descriptions. Personality assessments can, therefore, be both positive and negative in their potential use in conflict resolution. Perhaps their best function exists in how they help us to understand ourselves...
"What is necessary to change a person is to change his awareness of himself."
-Abraham Maslow
