Conflict Competence can be broken down into capacities you can develop:
- be able to meet your needs and interests
- and the needs and interests of others
- in almost every situation
- no matter how stressed, or tired, or emotional or threatened
- everyone might be feeling at the time.
The goal of being Conflict Competent is:
To have appropriate conflict competence capacities
in almost all situations with most people
(no one can be perfect every time all the time)
It is possible to be both conflict competent and conflict incompetent. You may be conflict competent with some people and conflict incompetent with others. Different situations call upon different conflict competence capacities.
For example, you might be extremely conflict competent at work, yet fall apart when your aging parent telephones for the fourth time in a day, or your ex arrives late to pick up the children, or your sibling reminds you of something you did decades ago. As a businessperson, you might allow a disappointed client to speak to you in a way you would not tolerate from your friends. Or, you might enjoy arguing in a debate with colleagues, but the same argument with an in-law might hit all your hot buttons until you retreat into behaviour left over from childhood.
Different people will have different effects on you depending on the shared history, power imbalances, emotional content of the conflict, and how you feel about the relationship. You can develop appropriate conflict competencies for various interactions.
Keys to Conflict Competence:
1. Recognize your triggers and be mindful of alternatives meanings to them
2. Identify the types of patterns in your conflict conversations
3. Manage your reactions to those conflict conversations
Hi Deb, just to get the ball rolling, I’m curious as to how you are defining conflict, as different disciplines tend to view the construct somewhat differently?
Cheers, JP
That’s a great question Janice, thanks for asking it.
There are many definitions of conflict, as you point out. The usual definitions of conflict from Conflict Theory are the actual or perceived incompatibilities of needs, values, or interests; or competition for limited resources. However, these sorts of definition have limited application in some conflicts.
For example, sometimes siding with one group does not mean sharing the group’s needs, values, motives, identities, attitudes, or interests. Public conflict, for example, binds people together despite their differences. Sometimes there are lots of resources and there is still conflict. Sometimes, everyone in the conflict agrees on the desired outcome and allocation of resources but fundamentally disagree on how to achieve their mutual goal. So those definitions really aren’t helpful in such cases.
Thus, after a lot of exploration over the years, I’ve settled on the explanation of conflict as Rex (1981:3) defined it: “action which is oriented intentionally to carrying out the actor’s will against the resistance of the other party or parties” that changes over time.
That fits my definition as informed by complexity science and conflict theory. It has nothing to say about motive, interests, resources, needs, or values, yet it captures the emotion that creates the conditions for conflict.
I’d be happy to discuss this with you further anytime.
Very best wishes
Deborah