Mediating application and knowledge, conflict management practitioners need to be well educated in conflict interaction styles, approaches, theories, themes, and leanings, then formulate an opinion as to why, with the various strategies for managing conflict, as discussed in our companion study, are ineffective.
While the suggestivity of the proficiency requirement calls for an opinion, it offers an opportunity to root that opinion squarely in the logic of our companion text, our lecturer, and within the context of 20 years of experience living on the periphery of conflict interactions. The requirement calls for an opinion. To the degree it does, it seems, from my experience, that many conflict interactions fail because the parties cannot see their goals and desired outcomes as escalating tendencies central to individual differences mediate conflict ecospheres. Sometimes, this is due to a concept I refer to as conflicting desires; oftentimes, especially within interpersonal matters, ranging and conflicting desires (drives) contribute to a fluctuation in individual state, which must stabilize before the parties can integrate. In other words, sometimes parties have to move through anger before progress can occur. This exemplifies the moment when patience and tolerance by the mediator must be strongest.
A more linear thought is that significant views, holdings, values, positions, thoughts, and biases contribute to conflict interactor’s dispositions. These significant challenges present barriers to successfully and permanently resolving conflict.
Our lecturer’s summary highlights that one more successful approach to managing conflict is through an identification and evaluation complex. This complex contemplates, among other things, clear identification of the issues at conflict, solution discovery, and implementation, yet further captions significant barriers ranging from superiority and helplessness to concepts of forgiveness.
Problem Purpose Expansion Technique
Our companion text highlights great value in adopting integrative approaches that help move parties through differentiation through more consensus-seeking attributes that seem centric to fostering collaborative, integrative environments where conflict can be mutually managed. The Problem Purpose Expansion Technique appears to be a natural approach to fostering an environment with a shared value of reducing conflict or permanently, collaboratively, resolving it. In this vein, when parties seem to adopt shared conflict values, the conflict recurs into remissive states. Yet, this very environment rests on the honesty and trust of the parties to fully manifest a solution through the parties’ shared desires.
Conflict Interactions: Collaborative Approaches More Often Than Not, Successful
In summary, to the degree our lecturer calls for a speculative opinion rooted in logic, teaching and learning, and experience, conflict resolution fails when the party’s needs are not permanently and satisfactorily met. In other words, when the drives of each party remain present, even following a conflict interaction, their needs remain unfulfilled, and the conflict only recedes into latent stages.
To this end, the motivation to fully resolve a conflict could be one cause for failure. This seems most evident in more intimate conflict settings, within the context of family matters, perhaps between spouses. In this environment, shared or fostered integrative approaches should be inherent. Yet, one party or the other’s needs are not meaningfully met through solutions that achieve a desired, permanent outcome. The recurrence of the same or similar issues seems to be a cause for many of the divorce cases uniquely studied.
Within the context of experience, recurrent conflict seems to be at the center of many divorce and interpersonal concerns that ultimately terminate at impasse or avoidance. The legal terms may be irreconcilable differences. Uniquely, the parties’ approach to conflict becomes highly individualized in pursuing their own needs; then, the environment polarizes, causing a shift in their implied integrated state. Over time and across experiences, the environment erodes to the degree where the parties reach an impasse and must divide to avoid conflict.
In many cases, if the parties took a genuinely collaborative approach using a shared view of the conflict at bar, the parties would actualize a solution through meaningful contexts that could have prevented the impasse. What could be a single forgiveness from one injured party to another result in continued forgiveness for repeated offenses, which erodes the parties’ trust and makes navigating the conflict ridden landscape impassable?
For these reasons, many people seem to be conflict-avoidant, which results in the erosion of trust and increases the likelihood of an impasse. In cases where constructive environments for problem-solving are present, relationship satisfaction is higher (Cramer, 2006). When relationship satisfaction is high, divorce potential is low (Karney & Bradbury, 1997).
Works Cited
Cramer, D. (2006). How a supportive partner may increase relationship satisfaction. In British Journal of Guidance and Counselling (Vol. 34, Issue 1, pp. 117–131). https://doi.org/10.1080/03069880500483141
Karney, B. R., & Bradbury, T. N. (1997). Neuroticism, marital interaction, and the trajectory of marital satisfaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(5), 1075–1092. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.5.1075