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Dorothea Hamdorf
Towards managing diversity: Cultural aspects of conflict management
in organizations
This study investigated
cultural aspects of conflict management in organizations in response to
the growing need for an understanding of how people from diverse cultural
backgrounds can work together without the often-resulting problem of intercultural
conflict.
Culture was evaluated through self-assessments of how independent or interdependent
the subjects were (Markus & Kitayama, 1991), and conflict behavior
through eight conflict management styles: dominating, integrating, compromising,
avoiding, obliging, emotion, neglect and third-party help (Rahim, 1983;
Ting-Toomey et al., 2000). Furthermore, drawing upon face-negotiation
theory (Ting-Toomey, 1988; Ting-Toomey & Kurogi, 1998), a test was
made of whether self-face, other-face and mutual-face concerns could explain
cultural differences in conflict behavior.
A total of 185 professionals from different countries 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.
In line with this study's hypotheses, persons with a tendency to act independently
mentioned direct styles, as well as integrating, and persons with a tendency
to act interdependently mentioned 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 conflict behavior, and a concern for mutual-face maintenance
to integrating and compromising.
However, persons with a tendency to act independently do not seem to be
particularly concerned about self-face maintenance. Persons with a tendency
to act interdependently, on the other hand, show other- and mutual-face
concerns in conflict situations. It was concluded that face concerns do
play a crucial role, but mainly in explaining the conflict behavior of
persons with a tendency to act interdependently. This was supported by
the fact that other-face concern mediated their readiness for conflict
avoidance.
These results are discussed and implications for further research are
presented.
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