Conflict participants face the basic choice of avoiding or engaging in a conflict. This choice leads to the five individual styles of conflict man- agement: avoidance, competition, compromise, accommodation, and collaboration. An assessment instrument was included to measure conflict styles. The specific styles were discussed as to their advantages and disadvantages. Competitive tactics include several subsets, such as threats, verbal aggressiveness, bullying, and violence.

One must be cautious about overinterpreting individual styles. Measures of styles depend on whether you are rating yourself or someone else, are affected by gender, and suffer from “social desir- ability” biases. Further, style measures are not process oriented and give the impression of more consistency in behavior than there is across con- texts. Finally, the measures give an impression of measuring an underlying trait (which they don’t), and, finally, style measures ignore the interaction dynamics—one of the key determiners of what style someone will use.

We discussed the interaction dynamics in some detail and concluded by noting that flexibil- ity in style choice enhances your chance for pro- ductive conflict.