The roles of emotion management and perspective taking in individuals’ conflict management styles and disposition to forgive

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Abstract

This study aimed to link two fields of research: conflict management and forgiveness. Adult participants (n = 122) and a validating sample of significant others (n = 122) completed measures of disposition to forgive, conflict style, emotion management, and perspective taking; and multi-dimensional models of their relationships were tested. Disposition to forgive was most consistently associated with problem solving and yielding conflict styles. Greater perspective taking was associated with greater forgiveness, and greater problem solving and yielding conflict styles, as well as with lesser fighting style; and perspective taking fully or partially mediated the relationship between ability to repair emotions and dispositions to forgive and problem solve during conflict. Significant other reports confirmed most of the findings based on self-report.

Introduction

Conflict is a normal part of human interactions; however, depending on how it is managed it can have constructive or destructive outcomes (Deutsch, 2006). Furthermore, individuals appear to have conflict management styles or dispositions that are relatively stable over time and across situations (Blake and Mouton, 1964, Sternberg and Soriano, 1984). Five conflict styles are usually discussed: fighting, yielding, avoiding, compromising and problem solving. These styles vary along dimensions of the individual’s motives (concern for self versus others; Carnevale & Pruitt, 1992), approach (competitive or cooperative; Deutsch, 2006), and outcome (who ‘wins’; Blake and Mouton, 1964, Wertheim et al., 2006).

Fighting (or forcing) involves endeavoring to meet one’s own interests, even at the expense of another party, generally with a win-lose (or lose-lose) result (Spangle and Isenbart, 2003, Wertheim et al., 2006). A yielding style involves managing conflict by fulfilling the other party’s needs at the expense of self-interests. Avoiding involves withdrawing from disputes; which generally fails to resolve the dispute. However researchers disagree about whether avoidance reflects lack of concern for others or a concern for others with the aim of preventing open conflict (Gabrielidis, Stephan, Ybarra, Dos Santos Pearson, & Villareal, 1997). While compromising involves seeking a common solution in which both parties give up something to reach a mutual middle ground, a problem solving style aims to find solutions acceptable to all parties, through addressing everyone’s interests creatively (Weitzman and Weitzman, 2006, Wertheim et al., 2006).

As these styles show, conflict can be resolved with varying degrees of satisfaction for each party. When conflict remains unresolved, a party ‘loses’, or a hurtful transgression takes place, grievances and resentment can form against the other party (Fincham et al., 2004, Hall, 1993). One way to handle such past grievances is through forgiveness (Fincham et al., 2004, Hill, 2001, Worthington et al., 1990). In the context of an interpersonal grievance, forgiveness involves transforming negative thoughts, affect, behavior or motivations towards the ‘offender’ to more positive ones (Enright and Fitzgibbons, 2000, McCullough et al., 2003). While forgiveness depends partly on situational variables (e.g., relationship context, offense severity), a disposition to forgive has been identified with some individuals more prone to forgive than others (Emmons, 2000, Koutsos et al., 2008).

While conflict resolution styles have been approached from different perspectives (De Dreu and Van De Vliert, 1997, Jones and White, 1985, Kurdek, 1994), their relationship with the tendency to forgive has been neglected. Given that forgiveness involves setting aside resentments, we proposed that a disposition to forgive would be related to greater yielding and lesser fighting styles, a hypothesis consistent with personality research linking forgiveness with agreeableness (Brose et al., 2005, Koutsos et al., 2008). However, a proneness to forgive might also involve a conflict style involving use of constructive problem solving, since one way to achieve forgiveness would be to find creative ways to address past hurts and meet one’s own (as well as others’) needs without harboring anger towards the offender. Finally, a less forgiving disposition might also be associated with distancing from ‘problematic’ relationships by avoiding confronting conflicts. The first aim of our study was, therefore, to explore these hypothesized relationships.

A second aim of this study was to examine some key determinants of both forgiveness and conflict resolution styles. Malcolm and Greenberg (2000) proposed an emotion-centered model of forgiveness in which negative affect and behaviors were transformed into positive ones in five phases. The first proposed phase involves acceptance and awareness of strong emotions (e.g., anger, sadness). In phase two (decision), the injured party realizes the importance of letting go of unmet interpersonal needs. Phase three involves reframing, where the forgiving person’s view of the offender shifts. In phase four, the injured party develops empathy and compassion for the offender. Finally, the forgiver moves forward and constructs a new narrative of self and other.

A key element of this model includes the ability to manage emotions or what has sometimes been referred to as ‘emotional intelligence’ (EI; Mayer and Salovey, 1997, Mayer et al., 2004). An awareness of one’s emotions is thought to lay the foundation for regulating or repairing one’s emotions (Mayer & Salovey, 1997) which enables forgiveness to eventuate. Self-report studies support this idea that greater levels of emotional intelligence are associated with greater agreeableness, cooperativeness (Schutte et al., 2001) and disposition to forgive (Emmons, 2000, Hodgson and Wertheim, 2007).

A second key component of Malcolm and Greenburg’s (2000) model is the role of perspective taking, a form of empathy involving “accurately perceiving the internal frame of reference of another” (Gold & Rogers, 1995, p. 79). McCullough, Worthington, and Rachal (1997) hypothesized that empathy interrupts people’s negative motivations regarding perceived transgressors and can elicit the offended party’s capacity to care for the needs of an offender. The important role of empathy for the transgressor in forgiveness has received empirical support (Hodgson and Wertheim, 2007, Konstam et al., 2001, McCullough et al., 1997).

A recent study suggested that dispositional empathy mediates the relationship between emotion management and forgiveness (Hodgson & Wertheim, 2007). Path modeling indicated that attention to and repair of emotions (but not clarity) added unique variance specifically to the perspective taking form of empathy, which was the sole direct predictor of forgiveness. The findings, supporting Macolm and Greenburg’s (2000) theorizing, suggested that the ability to attend to and repair emotions enables individuals to take another’s perspective, which in turn fosters forgiving. Our second study aim was to replicate this model in a new sample.

Given possible associations between forgiveness and conflict styles, a final aim was to examine whether Hodgson and Wertheim’s (2007) model could be extended to predicting dispositions towards particular conflict management styles. In the few studies on this question, authors suggest that effective conflict management requires attending to emotions that can disrupt negotiations (Bodtker and Jameson, 2001, Rahim and Psenicka, 2002) such as anger or distress. In a study of workplace conflict, greater self-awareness was associated with better self-regulation, empathy and social skills; and self-regulation in turn was associated with empathy and social skills (Goleman, 2001). A further study (Smith, Heaven, & Ciarrochi, 2008) found that emotional intelligence was associated with reports of more constructive intra-couple conflict-related communication patterns. Whether individuals’ conflict management styles are related to different aspects of emotion management, empathy or both still needs to be studied. The present study examined that question.

In summary, we hypothesized (H1) that a disposition to forgive would be associated with greater problem solving and yielding, and lesser avoiding and fighting conflict management styles; (H2) that Hodgson and Wertheim’s (2007) findings would be replicated with attention to and repair of emotions predicting the perspective-taking form of empathy, which would predict disposition to forgive; and (H3) that conflict styles would be predicted by emotion management and perspective taking dispositions. Specifically, the prediction of problem solving style was expected to parallel the model predicting forgivingness. In contrast, individuals prone to yielding were expected to be low in attending to and repairing emotions, but high in perspective taking. Individuals prone to fighting were also expected to be low in managing emotions, but to report not taking others’ perspectives. Finally, while avoiding was hypothesized to relate to low regulation of emotions, empathy-related predictions were not made, since avoiding might result from either too little or too much perspective taking.

Finally, most past studies have used university samples and self-report data. Self-reports are potentially influenced by factors such as social desirability or lack of subjective awareness; and people are often inaccurate reporters of their own abilities (Brackett & Mayer, 2003). Therefore, to minimize these effects and to strengthen the contribution to existing knowledge, the current study, examined whether relationships uncovered using self-report data from a community sample would be replicated using ‘significant other’ reporters who knew the participant well.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were gathered from the researcher’s social networks using a snowball approach. Family, friends and colleagues were invited to take part in the study and to inform other adults about the study. Of the 131 self-report respondents, 122 could be paired with a significant other (SO) questionnaire and were included in the final sample. Table 1 displays demographic information. Gender of participants was female = 61.7%, male = 39.3%; and of SOs female = 61.8%, male = 33.6%. Mean age was 31.25

Preliminary analyses

Univariate outliers were trimmed and all assumptions (e.g., normality, homoscedasticity, linearity) were met. Table 2 displays descriptive information, internal consistency and inter-rater reliability of scales. Scales demonstrated acceptable internal consistency given small number of items (Kline, 1986), Cronbach’s α > .70 for scales with >6 items; and the four 4-item conflict management style subscales had satisfactory inter-item correlation averages (Pallant, 2001) (.25–.43 for participants;

Discussion

Findings supported the hypotheses that individuals with a disposition to forgive are more active conflict-related problem solvers and likely to see others’ perspectives and accommodate others’ interests, while also finding ways to meet their own interests. Those more prone to forgive also were seen by others, but not by themselves, as more likely to avoid conflict and less likely to force others to meet their needs (although these were not strong relationships). The link between forgiveness and

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