Regina Tausan
Organizational Behavior
Andy Wagstaff
October 27, 2003
In every situation, we are responsible for our actions. Conflict situations offer each of us an opportunity to choose a style for responding to the conflict. The key to effective conflict prevention and management is to choose the conflict management style appropriate for the conflict. Most of us have a favorite style that we use in conflict situations, but we are all capable of choosing a different style when it is appropriate. In this paper, I propose to show my organizations approaches to conflict management as well as address some personal management styles that after an assessment showed in comparison to the five main types of conflict management styles.
The five types of conflict management styles are avoiding, accommodating, compromising, competing and authoritative command. People who choose the avoiding style do not get involved in conflict. A person choosing the avoiding style might say “you decide and leave me out of it”. People who choose the accommodating style put their interests last and let others have what they want. Many times these people believe that keeping a good relationship is more important that anything else. People choose a compromising style when it is important for them to satisfy some of their interests, but not all of them. People who compromise are likely to say, “Something is better than nothing”. Choosing a competitive style means that a person is putting his/her interest before anyone else’s interests. In fact, sometimes people who use the competitive style try hard to get what they want that they ruin relationships. Finally, we have authoritative command, whereby a formal authority simply dictates a solution and specifies what is gained and what is lost by whom. (Schermerhorn)