Wherever there are people involved, there will always be conflict. People deal with conflict and negotiation everyday, especially in the workplace. Sometimes people choose to avoid conflict and negotiation because they have difficulties and feel stress that conflict and negotiation can produce. Avoiding conflict and negotiation could help a group of people reach a temporary resolution for a short period of time; however, it will cause more obstacles and troubles in the future work. So it is extremely important to learn how to use efficiency skills to manage the conflict involving communication and contribute a great resolution for the long term.
Competing goals are the primary cause of conflict. If we want to solve the conflict, first we need to identify the cause of the conflict. There are usually two different types of goals in most conflict situations, which are content and relational. Since people have uncompromising elements of these two goals, the conflict will be brought to them. First, according to the definition of the content goals, “Content goals involve the apparent issues or obvious reason for a dispute” (O’Hair et al., p335). Most of the time, people all understand their own content goals very well; however, they have different perspectives unknown to each other. Many times conflicts are led by failure to communicate differing goals. Second, relationship goals are very important in communication as well because conflict may not be handled until the relationship goals are managed.
There are several different strategies to solve conflicts, which depend on the different level of concern for content goals and for relational goals. They are competing, accommodating, avoiding, compromising, and collaborating. Additionally, there are some important approaches to conflict: goal setting, situational knowledge, communication competence, and anxiety management.