Towards managing diversity : cultural aspects of conflict management in organizations

Abstract

This study investigates cultural aspects of conflict perception and behavior in organizations.Culture was assessed through independent (IN) and interdependent (INTER) self-construals, conflict perception through task- and relationship-orientation, and conflict behavior through eight conflict management styles: dominating, integrating, compromising, avoiding, obliging, emotion, neglect and third party help. Furthermore, drawing upon the face-negotiation theory (Ting-Toomey & Kurogi, 1998) it was tested, whether self-face, other-face and mutual-face concerns would explain cultural differences in conflict behavior.185 professionals with diverse cultural backgrounds completed an Internet questionnaire.An exploratory factor analysis of the eight styles revealed three factors, which seem to describe direct, indirect and integrating plus compromising conflict behaviors.Contrary to this study s predictions, results did not reveal IN to be associated with task- and INTER with relationship-orientation. Furthermore, these perception tendencies were not visible either in the definition of integrating and compromising. In line with this study s hypotheses, IN was linked to direct styles, as well as to integrating and INTER with indirect styles in addition to integrating and compromising.Furthermore, a concern for self-face maintenance was related to direct conflict behavior, a concern for other-face maintenance to indirect and a concern for mutual-face maintenance to integrating and compromising.However, IN was not connected to self-face maintenance, whereas INTER was associated with other- and mutual-face concerns. It was then concluded that face concerns play a crucial role mainly in explaining the conflict behavior of persons with an interdependent self-construal. This was supported by the fact that other-face concern mediated their tendency for conflict avoidance.These results are discussed and implications for further research and practice are presented.