Competitive Conflict Styles
Everybody deals with conflicts differently. How you tend to handle such situations is your conflict-management style. Conflict-management styles include cooperative conflict management, avoidance strategies and competitive conflict management. People often choose a style based on their personalities and what makes them comfortable.
Other People Are Reading
-
Competitive Conflict Management
-
A competitive conflict-management style involves placing your interest ahead of everyone else's. This style is based on maximizing the outcome for you, regardless of the outcome for others. This may be ideal in a situation that involves scarce resources, or if the other party chooses such a style. If outcomes to a conflict are limited to winning or losing, participants may opt to compete with each other to win.
Types of Competitive Behavior
-
There are different ways of engaging in competitive behavior. Competitors could lie to each other, conceal their goals or conceal their interests. They could also attack or criticize their opponent. Other competitive behavior forms include rejecting the other party's arguments, threatening others and denying responsibility for your actions. Also, someone with a competitive conflict-management style could pretend to be hostile, or actually be hostile. People can choose more than one competitive behavior.
-
Advantages and Disadvantages
-
When participants in the conflict are not in a long-term relationship, a competitive conflict style can help resolve the conflict quickly. The outcome could feel like an accomplishment for the winner; the loser's outcome is not optimal. The competitive approach to conflict management is not conducive to building long-term relationships; it would sooner divide them.
Other Styles
-
Conflict-management styles extend beyond the competitive style. Someone comfortable with an avoidance style tends to flee from conflict. If you have an accommodation style, you relent to the other person's wishes. A compromise style involves agreeing to split the differences. Those with a collaboration style work together to find a mutually agreeable solution.
-
References
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Goodshoot/Getty Images
