Understanding the integrative approach to conflict management

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the integrative approach to conflicts.Integration is an active search for information about facts and interests -motivated by a willingness to find mutually satisfactory agreements -and is usually necessary for creating high quality settlements in conflicts. Thus, in order to understand how to avoid win-lose outcomes, or impasses, we need knowledge about factors that relate to, and promote, integration. We here use five data-sets to explore factors relating to individuals' inclination to integrate. Our results show that (a) degree of integration varies, that (b) the variation can be explained by individual differences, by situational differences, and to some degree by group differences, and that (c) integration predicts high quality outcomes in conflicts.KEY WORDS: Conflict Management, Negotiation, Integrative style, Integrative behavior. Conflict Management 3Handling conflicts constructively are one of the greatest challenges in the modern world. Despite maturing societies, growth in scientific knowledge, and a more educated population, we still face damaging conflicts. Conflicts escalate, we reach impasses, and we hurt each other in the conflict process. Individuals get psychological problems, interpersonal relations break down, groups fight, and nations and societies are at war. Notwithstanding all this, conflict management researchers still insist that many -and even most -conflicts have an integrative potential. That is, parties can get a mutual satisfactory agreement if they persistently search for it. Therefore, many of the harmful conflicts that we face today have the potential of being handled constructively.In order to handle conflicts constructively, the individuals involved must -according to conflict research (e.g., Pruitt & Carnevale, 1993) -have an integrative approach. That is, they must search for information about facts and interests, and creatively use that information to generate mutually satisfactory agreements. Thus, integration is a key concept in the conflict management literature. It is used in relation to various aspects of the conflict management process -e.g., integrative potential, integrative outcome, integrative process and integrative intention/style and behavior -and is largely synonymous with the term problem solving in conflict research, and with the "win-win" notion in the negotiation literature. At a broad level, integration concerns the creation of values over and above what isachieved if the parties only divide the values that seem obviously available at the outset of a conflict management process. Value creation is about identifying areas of joint gain and to create settlements based on this. Values can, for example, be created by trading across issues where the parties have different priorities, rather than by compromising on one single issue at a time. In order to do so the parties must somehow share information about (differential) priorities, and propose solutions that take both parties interests into account. For exam...

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