The Dynamics of Conflict Resolution: A Practitioner's Guide / Edition 1

by Bernard Mayer

Overview

This empowering guide goes beyond observable techniques to offer a close look at the creative internal processes—both cognitive and psychological—that successful mediators and other conflict resolvers draw upon.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780787950194
Publisher:	Wiley
Publication date:	04/28/2000
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.42(w) x 9.02(h) x 1.01(d)

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The Nature of Conflict

We all are of two minds about conflict. We say that conflict is natural, inevitable, necessary, and normal, and that the problem is not the existence of conflict but how we handle it. But we are also loath to admit that we are in the midst of conflict. Parents assure their children that the ferocious argument the parents are having is not a conflict, just a "discussion." Organizations will hire facilitators to guide them in strategic planning, goal setting, quality circles, team building, and all manner of training, but they shy away from asking for help with internal conflicts. Somehow, to say that we are in conflict is to admit a failure and to acknowledge the existence of a situation we consider hopeless.

What Is Conflict?

Conflict may be viewed as occurring along cognitive (perception), emotional (feeling), and behavioral (action) dimensions. This three-dimensional perspective can help us understand the complexities of conflict and why a conflict sometimes seems to proceed in contradictory directions.

Conflict as Perception

As a set of perceptions, conflict is a belief or understanding that one's own needs, interests, wants, or values are incompatible with someone else's. There are both objective and subjective elements to this cognitive dimension. If I want to develop a tract of land into a shopping center, and you want to preserve it as open space, then there is an objective incompatibility in our wants. If I believe that the way you desire to guide our son's educational development is incompatible with my philosophy of parenting, then there is at least a significant subjective component. What if only one of us believes an incompatibility to exist, are we still in conflict? As a practical matter, I find it useful to think of conflict as existing if at least one person believes it to exist. If I believe us to have incompatible interests, and act accordingly, then I am engaging you in a conflict process whether you share this perception or not.

Conflict as Feeling

Conflict also involves an emotional reaction to a situation or interaction that signals a disagreement of some kind. The emotions felt might be fear, sadness, bitterness, anger, or hopelessness, or some amalgam of these. If we experience these feelings in regard to another person or situation, we feel that we are in conflict-and therefore we are. As a mediator, I have sometimes seen people behave as if they were in great disagreement over profound issues, yet I have not been able to ascertain exactly what they disagreed about. Nonetheless, they were in conflict because they felt they were. And in conflicts, it does not take two to tango. Often a conflict exists because one person feels in conflict with another, even though those feelings are not reciprocated by or even known to the other person. The behavioral component may be minimal, but the conflict is still very real to the person experiencing the feelings.

Conflict as Action

Conflict also consists of the actions that we take to express our feelings, articulate our perceptions, and get our needs met in a way that has the potential for interfering with someone else's ability to get his or her needs met. This conflict behavior may involve a direct attempt to make something happen at someone else's expense. It may be an exercise of power. It may be violent. It may be destructive. Conversely, this behavior may be conciliatory, constructive, and friendly. But, whatever its tone, the purpose of conflict behavior is either to express the conflict or to get one's needs met. Again, the question of reciprocity exists. If you write letters to the editor, sign petitions, and consult lawyers to stop my shopping center, and I do not even know you exist, are we in conflict? Can you be in conflict with me if I am not in conflict with you? Theory aside, I think the practical answer to both of these questions is yes.

Two employees are assigned to work together on a project and soon find themselves in a conflict over whether they are each pulling their weight and passing along important information to each other. They engage in a fairly public shouting match, and they each complain to their supervisor. The supervisor sits them both down, and they agree on a workload division and certain behavioral standards, to which they then seem to adhere. Has the conflict been resolved? It may have been alleviated along the behavioral dimension. But each goes away from this meeting feeling victimized by the other and unappreciated by the boss. One of the employees decides that these feelings just result from the nature of the job and believes that the immediate conflict is over, but the other continues to see the conflict being acted out every time the other person comes late for a meeting or sends a terse e-mail. Thus progress has been made in the behavioral dimension, the emotional dimension is if anything worse, and there are contradictory developments along the cognitive dimension. This kind of result is not unusual in conflict, and it drives people to behave in apparently inconsistent ways. These employees may cease their overtly conflictual behavior, but the tension between them may actually increase.

What Causes Conflict?

Conflict has many roots, and there are many theories that try to explain these origins. Conflict is seen as arising from basic human instincts, from the competition for resources and power, from the structure of the societies and institutions people create, from the inevitable struggle between classes. Even though there is something to be said for most of these theories, they are not always helpful to us as we contend with conflict. What we need is a framework that helps us use some of the best insights of different conflict theories in a practical way.

Communication

Humans are very imperfect communicators. Sometimes this imperfection generates conflict, whether or not there is a significant incompatibility of interests, and it almost always makes conflict harder to solve. Human communication has inspired a large literature and multiple fields of study, and I will discuss communication as a resolution tool later. The main thing to consider here is how hard it is for individuals to communicate about complex matters, particularly under emotionally difficult circumstances. We should keep reminding ourselves just how easy it is for communication to go awry. Conflict frequently escalates because people act on the assumption that they have communicated accurately when they have not. When they learn that others are acting on the basis of different information and assumptions, they often attribute this to bad faith or deviousness and not to the imperfections of human communication.

Emotions

Emotions are the energy that fuel conflict. If people could always stay perfectly rational and focused on how to best meet their needs and accommodate those of others, and if they could calmly work to establish effective communications, then many conflicts would either never arise or would quickly deescalate. But of course that is not human nature, even if many of us occasionally pretend that it is. At times emotions seem to be in control of behavior. Sometimes they are also a source of power for disputants. They contribute to the energy, strength, courage, and perseverance that allow people to participate forcefully in conflict.

Values

Values are the beliefs we have about what is important, what distinguishes right from wrong and good from evil, and what principles should govern how we lead our lives. When a conflict is defined or experienced as an issue of values, it becomes more charged and intractable. Because people define themselves in part by their core beliefs, when they believe these values are under attack, they feel they are being attacked. Similarly, it is hard for people to compromise when core beliefs are in play, because they feel they are compromising themselves or their integrity.

Structure

The structure, the external framework, in which an interaction takes place or an issue develops is another source of conflict. The elements of a structure may include available resources, decision-making procedures, time constraints, communication procedures, and physical settings. Even when compatible interests might move people toward a more cooperative stance, the structure in which they are working may promote conflict. An example is the litigation process, one structure for decision making when people are in conflict. Litigation is well designed for achieving a decisive outcome when other less adversarial procedures have not worked. However, it is also a structure that exacerbates conflict, makes compromise difficult, and casts issues as win-lose struggles. Voting is another interesting example. When voting is used to resolve serious differences about an issue, the issue tends to become polarized, and constructive communication can become difficult. Often, candidates for office try to seize the center of the political spectrum on many important issues and therefore exhibit little real difference on these issues. However, they also look for so-called wedge issues that can put them into conflict with their rivals and at the same time, they hope, into favor with a large segment of voters. However, this can increase the conflict among the public on such issues as affirmative action, abortion, gun control, welfare, or health care.

History

Conflict cannot be understood independently of its historical context. The history of the people who are participants in a conflict, of the systems in which the conflict is occurring, and of the issues themselves has a powerful influence on the course of the conflict. History provides the momentum for the development of conflict. Too often we try to understand a conflict in isolation from its historical roots and as a result are baffled by the stubbornness of the players. Conversely, history is not a determinant of conflict, although sometimes it can seem that way. The long history of conflict in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or the former Yugoslavia, for example, does not mean that present conflicts in these regions will never be settled. That form of historical determinism is dangerous and misleading. However, such conflicts cannot be solved without an understanding of the complicated systems of interaction that have developed over time and the degree to which the conflict itself has become part of the disputants' identity.

All these different sources of conflict-communication, emotions, values, structure, and history-interact with each other. People's history affects their values, communication style, emotional reactions, and the structure in which they operate. And history is constantly being made and therefore affected by these other sources.

Ten cousins who lived in different parts of the United States and Canada jointly inherited a valuable piece of oceanfront property in New England. This property had belonged to their grandfather, who had decided to leave it directly to them partly because of his distress about the poor relationships among his three children, the cousins' parents. The property had been the site of many of the happiest moments in the cousins' childhood, but it was in disrepair, and the existing house and road probably needed to be replaced. The cousins ranged in age from twenty to forty-five and had extremely different financial situations, from quite poor to very wealthy. They had widely different views about what should be done, from selling the property and dividing up the equity to preserving it as a family center. For the property to be usable, a considerable investment would have to be made, which not all the cousins were in a position to do.

so long.

and the best the family had to offer. The cousins had different values about sharing the property, developing it, equalizing contributions, taking into account different resources, and how families ought to interact. The structural problems were enormous. The cousins had no easy way of communicating, making decisions, or overseeing work on the property, and the disparity in their resources greatly complicated the picture. Furthermore, numerous local land use regulations limited their options for subdividing the property or building additional structures. Finally, history was a heavy presence. In many ways the cousins were continuing a multigeneration family saga. The conflicts among the parents were in danger of being replicated. There was also a positive history as well-the childhood memories that each had of their time at the property were almost all positive and were a motivation to seek a constructive resolution.

relatively limited (three days), we decided that we could not deal with issues internal to sibling groups and that the strength of the cousins was the relatively positive attitudes they were expressing across sibling groups. We felt that the history needed to be addressed and that the major immediate focus needed to be on the structural barriers to moving forward. We therefore started by asking each cousin to share his or her memories of time spent on the property and his or her hopes and fears for its future. As an outcome of this discussion, they all decided they really wanted to keep the property if at all possible. They agreed to work on a plan for keeping the property, and they also agreed that everyone should have some access to it, regardless of his or her contribution. Once these general agreements were made, we then focused on the structural issues of how to communicate, make decisions, work with local authorities, and get information about different options. The cousins left with some general decisions made and an interesting communication and decision-making structure. They set up a steering committee with one representative from each sibling group. Our intervention thus flowed from our analysis of the structure and causes of this particular conflict. Without some way of organizing our thinking about this complex situation, we would have been lost.

Additionally, there are three dynamics that the wheel of conflict model does not include, because they cut across all the sources and are often best analyzed in terms of those sources. They are culture, power, and data. Culture affects conflict because it is embedded in individuals' communication styles, history, way of dealing with emotions, values, and structures. Power is a very elusive concept, one that can confuse our thinking or help us understand an interaction. Some sources of power are structural, but other elements are involved as well. I deal with power and culture more extensively in Chapters Three and Four. I do not view data themselves as a source of conflict, but how data are handled and communicated can lead to conflict. Therefore, data, or information, can be viewed as an issue within both communication and structure. (For an overview of the major theories of conflict and its origins, see Wehr, 1979; also see Frost and Wilmot, 1978; Kriesberg, 1982; Schellenburg, 1982; Schelling, 1960.)

The Continuum of Human Needs

At the center of the wheel of conflict model are the human needs that drive people's actions, including engagement in conflict. Many theorists, from Freud to Maslow, have characterized fundamental human needs. Several of them describe the different levels of needs that people experience. In the literature on conflict, a distinction is often made between interests and needs. Interests are viewed as more transitory and superficial, needs as more basic and enduring. Sometimes it is argued that resolutions that address interests but not needs are less meaningful, more Band-Aids than real solutions (Burton and Dukes, 1990).

Interests

Interests are the needs that motivate the bulk of people's actions, and they can be viewed simply and superficially or in great depth. A challenge we face in the practical understanding of conflict is to determine what level of needs or interests best explains a conflict. When we have too superficial a view of the sources of a conflict, we cannot address it meaningfully. Conversely, when we address these sources at a level that is too deep, we make the conflict much harder to resolve and we may also fail to match the reality experienced by the disputants.

Identity-Based Needs

Beyond interests are what we can call identity-based needs (Rothman, 1997). These are people's needs to preserve a sense of who they are and what their place in the world is. It is useful to think of four needs in this category: the needs for meaning, community, intimacy, and autonomy.

company, for example, or with a social action organization; a church, synagogue, or mosque; an athletic or artistic subculture; a profession; or an ethnic group. Community can be experienced in both positive and negative ways. Individuals may identify with others on the basis of what they all share or what they are all against. As an identity-based need, community is not simply about feeling part of a group; it is about having a social home in an impersonal world-a home where people feel connected, safe, recognized as individuals, and appreciated. When people are in conflict in order to solidify a sense of community or to protect their community against the forces of disintegration, they are in part struggling to preserve their identity.

The Desires for Expression and for Outcome

In many conflicts people act in a way that seems to go against their interests. Sometimes they seem more interested in having their day in court than in arriving at a solution that gives them what they need. They are sometimes more interested in expressing their feelings than getting results. Conversely, people sometimes dismiss attempts to explore what they are experiencing as inappropriate or "touchy-feely."

Why Think About Conflict?

The premise of this book and the field of conflict studies in general is that conflict and conflict resolution are useful areas of focus in order to better understand human behavior. There are certainly alternative ways of analyzing these kinds of interactions. Professionals concerned with how people handle their differences can focus on decision making, negotiation, communication, stimulus response, power exchanges, and so forth. Why should those of us who have identified ourselves as professional conflict resolvers focus on conflict? Does this not direct our attention to the negative aspect of the interchange, to the part that has people at odds rather than the part that concerns the mutual interests people share?

professionals with a basic tool for addressing the essential forces that shape the development of individuals and social entities.

Table of Contents

Preface: Thinking About Conflict and Its Resolution.

Part One: Conflict.

1 The Nature of Conflict.

2 How People Conflict.

3 Power and Conflict.

4 Culture and Conflict.

Part Two: Resolution.

5 The Nature of Resolution.

6 Communication.

7 Negotiation and Advocacy.

8 The Road to Resolution: Overcoming Impasse.

9 Mediation.

10 Other Approaches to the Resolution of Conflict.

11 Conclusion: Conflict Resolution in Our Lives.

About the Author.

References.

Index.

Editorial Reviews

"In Mayer's book, the author presents a particularly unique perspective on the resolution of disputes and the prevention of conflict." (Mediate.com, 1/02)

From the Publisher

Mayer, a longtime professional mediator, discusses ways that conflict resolution specialists can productively think about conflict and resolution in order to help them be effective as negotiators, facilitators, mediators, and communicators. The first four chapters present concepts that are helpful in understanding the process of conflict. The remaining seven chapters discuss the resolution process in detail. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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