Avoiding conflict style, also known as the avoidance or withdrawal style, is one of the five primary conflict-handling styles identified in conflict management theory. It involves evading or sidestepping conflicts and disputes rather than confronting or addressing them directly. Individuals who adopt this style tend to prioritize maintaining harmony, avoiding confrontation, and preserving relationships over resolving issues.
Avoiding conflict style holds significant importance for several reasons:
Preserving Relationships: It is a valuable tool for maintaining positive relationships by avoiding potentially harmful conflicts.
Minimizing Disruption: Avoiding conflicts can prevent disruptions and distractions in personal and professional settings.
Time and Energy Conservation: It allows individuals to conserve time and emotional energy that would otherwise be spent on resolving conflicts.
Temporary Solution: In some cases, avoidance can serve as a temporary solution until emotions or circumstances change.
Conflict De-escalation: Avoidance can contribute to de-escalating conflicts and preventing them from intensifying.
Principles of Avoiding Conflict Style
Avoiding conflict style is guided by several key principles:
Conflict Avoidance: The primary goal is to avoid or sidestep conflicts rather than engage in them.
Harmony Preservation: It prioritizes maintaining harmony and positive relationships over addressing disagreements.
Low Confrontation: Avoidance style tends to involve low levels of confrontation and assertiveness.
Temporary Solution: Avoidance may provide a temporary reprieve from conflict but does not necessarily resolve underlying issues.
Conflict Timing: Avoidance may involve choosing the right time and place to address conflicts or postponing them indefinitely.
Key Elements of Avoiding Conflict Style
To understand avoiding conflict style fully, it’s essential to consider its key elements:
Conflict Avoidance: Avoiding conflict style is characterized by a deliberate effort to steer clear of conflicts or disputes.
Low Confrontation: It involves low levels of confrontation, with individuals often choosing not to assert their opinions or positions.
Relationship Focus: Preserving relationships and avoiding damage to them is a central element of this style.
Short-Term Approach: Avoidance may be a short-term strategy to manage immediate discomfort or stress.
Potential Consequences: It acknowledges that avoiding conflicts may have consequences, such as unresolved issues or increased tension.
Techniques in Avoiding Conflict Style
Avoiding conflict style involves specific techniques for evading or postponing conflicts:
Delaying Discussion: Choose to delay discussing or addressing conflicts until a more opportune time.
Changing the Subject: Shift the conversation away from conflict-inducing topics to more neutral or pleasant subjects.
Withdrawing from Interactions: Physically or emotionally withdraw from interactions or situations that may lead to conflict.
Seeking Mediation: Involve a neutral third party, such as a mediator or facilitator, to help manage or resolve conflicts.
Compromising or Giving In: In some cases, individuals may choose to compromise or give in to the preferences or demands of others to avoid conflicts.
Real-World Applications of Avoiding Conflict Style
Avoiding conflict style has practical applications in various real-world scenarios:
Workplace Harmony: In professional settings, individuals may use avoiding to maintain a harmonious work environment and avoid office conflicts.
Social Gatherings: During social gatherings, avoiding may help individuals steer clear of sensitive or controversial topics to prevent conflicts.
Family Reunions: In family dynamics, avoiding can be used to keep family gatherings peaceful and pleasant.
Temporary Conflict Management: Avoidance may serve as a temporary means of managing conflict until individuals are ready to address it.
Conflict De-escalation: Avoiding can be a strategy to de-escalate ongoing conflicts by removing oneself from the situation.
Challenges and Considerations
Employing the avoiding conflict style comes with its challenges and considerations:
Unresolved Issues: Avoiding conflicts may lead to unresolved issues that can resurface later, potentially causing more significant problems.
Communication Breakdown: Excessive avoidance can result in breakdowns in communication and misunderstandings.
Escalation Risk: In some cases, avoidance can lead to conflict escalation if issues are not addressed promptly.
Stress and Anxiety: Constantly avoiding conflicts can lead to stress and anxiety, as individuals may suppress their true feelings and concerns.
Avoidance Patterns: Overreliance on avoidance can create patterns of avoidance that hinder personal growth and the development of conflict resolution skills.
Conclusion
Avoiding conflict style is a valid and sometimes necessary approach to managing conflicts, particularly when the preservation of relationships and maintaining harmony are top priorities. By adhering to its principles, understanding its key elements, and employing its techniques effectively, individuals can navigate situations where avoiding conflicts is the most suitable strategy.
However, it is essential to use the avoiding conflict style judiciously and consider its potential consequences, especially when conflicts remain unresolved or escalate over time. In many situations, a balanced approach that combines avoidance with assertiveness and collaboration may yield more favorable and sustainable results. As a tool in the conflict management toolkit, the avoiding style should be applied with careful consideration of the specific context and desired outcomes.
Aspect
Avoiding Conflict Style
Definition
The avoiding conflict style, also known as the avoidant or withdrawal style, is a conflict resolution approach characterized by minimizing confrontation and postponing resolution of the conflict. It involves sidestepping or ignoring the conflict altogether, often in an attempt to maintain peace and avoid tension with the opposing party.
Characteristics
– Avoidance: Involves evading or ignoring the conflict rather than addressing it directly, often by changing the subject or avoiding interaction with the opposing party.
– Postponement: Delays addressing the conflict in the hopes that it will resolve itself over time or that emotions will subside, allowing for calmer discussion later.
– Minimization of Conflict: Prioritizes maintaining harmony and preserving relationships over addressing underlying issues or resolving disagreements.
Benefits
– Temporary Relief: Provides temporary relief from the stress and discomfort associated with conflict by avoiding confrontation or tense interactions.
– Time for Reflection: Allows parties to reflect on the situation and cool down emotionally, potentially leading to calmer and more rational discussions in the future.
– Preservation of Relationships: Helps prevent further damage to relationships by avoiding heated arguments or escalated conflicts.
Challenges
– Unresolved Issues: Leaves underlying issues unresolved, potentially leading to accumulated resentment or recurring conflicts in the future.
– Communication Breakdown: Can result in communication breakdowns or misunderstandings due to the lack of open dialogue and failure to address concerns.
– Escalation Risk: The conflict may escalate if underlying issues continue to fester without resolution, leading to greater tension and difficulty in reconciliation.
Strategies
– Change the Subject: Redirect the conversation away from the conflict topic to less contentious subjects to avoid further tension or disagreement.
– Seek Common Ground: Identify areas of common agreement or shared interests to focus on during interactions to minimize conflict potential.
– Agree to Disagree: Acknowledge that differences of opinion exist and agree to disagree without pursuing further discussion or debate on the topic.
Applications
– Personal Relationships: Used in personal relationships to avoid arguments or conflictual discussions that may strain relationships or cause emotional distress.
– Workplace Dynamics: Employed in workplace settings to minimize workplace conflicts and maintain professionalism and productivity among team members.
– Group Settings: Applied in group settings or meetings where addressing certain topics may lead to tension or disagreement, leading to avoidance of such topics.
Outcomes
– Short-Term Relief: Provides immediate relief from conflict-related stress or tension but may result in unresolved issues and lingering tension in the long run.
– Maintained Relationships: Helps preserve relationships by avoiding confrontation and minimizing conflict, although it may hinder open communication and problem-solving.
– Potential for Escalation: The conflict may persist or resurface in the future if underlying issues remain unresolved, leading to future conflicts or strained relationships.
Convergent thinking occurs when the solution to a problem can be found by applying established rules and logical reasoning. Whereas divergent thinking is an unstructured problem-solving method where participants are encouraged to develop many innovative ideas or solutions to a given problem. Where convergent thinking might work for larger, mature organizations where divergent thinking is more suited for startups and innovative companies.
The concept of cognitive biases was introduced and popularized by the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in 1972. Biases are seen as systematic errors and flaws that make humans deviate from the standards of rationality, thus making us inept at making good decisions under uncertainty.
Second-order thinking is a means of assessing the implications of our decisions by considering future consequences. Second-order thinking is a mental model that considers all future possibilities. It encourages individuals to think outside of the box so that they can prepare for every and eventuality. It also discourages the tendency for individuals to default to the most obvious choice.
Lateral thinking is a business strategy that involves approaching a problem from a different direction. The strategy attempts to remove traditionally formulaic and routine approaches to problem-solving by advocating creative thinking, therefore finding unconventional ways to solve a known problem. This sort of non-linear approach to problem-solving, can at times, create a big impact.
Bounded rationality is a concept attributed to Herbert Simon, an economist and political scientist interested in decision-making and how we make decisions in the real world. In fact, he believed that rather than optimizing (which was the mainstream view in the past decades) humans follow what he called satisficing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a task overestimate their ability to perform that task well. Consumers or businesses that do not possess the requisite knowledge make bad decisions. What’s more, knowledge gaps prevent the person or business from seeing their mistakes.
Occam’s Razor states that one should not increase (beyond reason) the number of entities required to explain anything. All things being equal, the simplest solution is often the best one. The principle is attributed to 14th-century English theologian William of Ockham.
The Lindy Effect is a theory about the ageing of non-perishable things, like technology or ideas. Popularized by author Nicholas Nassim Taleb, the Lindy Effect states that non-perishable things like technology age – linearly – in reverse. Therefore, the older an idea or a technology, the same will be its life expectancy.
Antifragility was first coined as a term by author, and options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Antifragility is a characteristic of systems that thrive as a result of stressors, volatility, and randomness. Therefore, Antifragile is the opposite of fragile. Where a fragile thing breaks up to volatility; a robust thing resists volatility. An antifragile thing gets stronger from volatility (provided the level of stressors and randomness doesn’t pass a certain threshold).
Systems thinking is a holistic means of investigating the factors and interactions that could contribute to a potential outcome. It is about thinking non-linearly, and understanding the second-order consequences of actions and input into the system.
Vertical thinking, on the other hand, is a problem-solving approach that favors a selective, analytical, structured, and sequential mindset. The focus of vertical thinking is to arrive at a reasoned, defined solution.
Maslow’s Hammer, otherwise known as the law of the instrument or the Einstellung effect, is a cognitive bias causing an over-reliance on a familiar tool. This can be expressed as the tendency to overuse a known tool (perhaps a hammer) to solve issues that might require a different tool. This problem is persistent in the business world where perhaps known tools or frameworks might be used in the wrong context (like business plans used as planning tools instead of only investors’ pitches).
The Peter Principle was first described by Canadian sociologist Lawrence J. Peter in his 1969 book The Peter Principle. The Peter Principle states that people are continually promoted within an organization until they reach their level of incompetence.
The straw man fallacy describes an argument that misrepresents an opponent’s stance to make rebuttal more convenient. The straw man fallacy is a type of informal logical fallacy, defined as a flaw in the structure of an argument that renders it invalid.
The Streisand Effect is a paradoxical phenomenon where the act of suppressing information to reduce visibility causes it to become more visible. In 2003, Streisand attempted to suppress aerial photographs of her Californian home by suing photographer Kenneth Adelman for an invasion of privacy. Adelman, who Streisand assumed was paparazzi, was instead taking photographs to document and study coastal erosion. In her quest for more privacy, Streisand’s efforts had the opposite effect.
As highlighted by German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer in the paper “Heuristic Decision Making,” the term heuristic is of Greek origin, meaning “serving to find out or discover.” More precisely, a heuristic is a fast and accurate way to make decisions in the real world, which is driven by uncertainty.
The recognition heuristic is a psychological model of judgment and decision making. It is part of a suite of simple and economical heuristics proposed by psychologists Daniel Goldstein and Gerd Gigerenzer. The recognition heuristic argues that inferences are made about an object based on whether it is recognized or not.
The representativeness heuristic was first described by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The representativeness heuristic judges the probability of an event according to the degree to which that event resembles a broader class. When queried, most will choose the first option because the description of John matches the stereotype we may hold for an archaeologist.
The take-the-best heuristic is a decision-making shortcut that helps an individual choose between several alternatives. The take-the-best (TTB) heuristic decides between two or more alternatives based on a single good attribute, otherwise known as a cue. In the process, less desirable attributes are ignored.
The bundling bias is a cognitive bias in e-commerce where a consumer tends not to use all of the products bought as a group, or bundle. Bundling occurs when individual products or services are sold together as a bundle. Common examples are tickets and experiences. The bundling bias dictates that consumers are less likely to use each item in the bundle. This means that the value of the bundle and indeed the value of each item in the bundle is decreased.
The Barnum Effect is a cognitive bias where individuals believe that generic information – which applies to most people – is specifically tailored for themselves.
First-principles thinking – sometimes called reasoning from first principles – is used to reverse-engineer complex problems and encourage creativity. It involves breaking down problems into basic elements and reassembling them from the ground up. Elon Musk is among the strongest proponents of this way of thinking.
The ladder of inference is a conscious or subconscious thinking process where an individual moves from a fact to a decision or action. The ladder of inference was created by academic Chris Argyris to illustrate how people form and then use mental models to make decisions.
Goodhart’s Law is named after British monetary policy theorist and economist Charles Goodhart. Speaking at a conference in Sydney in 1975, Goodhart said that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” Goodhart’s Law states that when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
The Six Thinking Hats model was created by psychologist Edward de Bono in 1986, who noted that personality type was a key driver of how people approached problem-solving. For example, optimists view situations differently from pessimists. Analytical individuals may generate ideas that a more emotional person would not, and vice versa.
The Mandela effect is a phenomenon where a large group of people remembers an event differently from how it occurred. The Mandela effect was first described in relation to Fiona Broome, who believed that former South African President Nelson Mandela died in prison during the 1980s. While Mandela was released from prison in 1990 and died 23 years later, Broome remembered news coverage of his death in prison and even a speech from his widow. Of course, neither event occurred in reality. But Broome was later to discover that she was not the only one with the same recollection of events.
The bandwagon effect tells us that the more a belief or idea has been adopted by more people within a group, the more the individual adoption of that idea might increase within the same group. This is the psychological effect that leads to herd mentality. What in marketing can be associated with social proof.
Moore’s law states that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years. This observation was made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and it become a guiding principle for the semiconductor industry and has had far-reaching implications for technology as a whole.
Disruptive innovation as a term was first described by Clayton M. Christensen, an American academic and business consultant whom The Economist called “the most influential management thinker of his time.” Disruptive innovation describes the process by which a product or service takes hold at the bottom of a market and eventually displaces established competitors, products, firms, or alliances.
Value migration was first described by author Adrian Slywotzky in his 1996 book Value Migration – How to Think Several Moves Ahead of the Competition. Value migration is the transferal of value-creating forces from outdated business models to something better able to satisfy consumer demands.
The bye-now effect describes the tendency for consumers to think of the word “buy” when they read the word “bye”. In a study that tracked diners at a name-your-own-price restaurant, each diner was asked to read one of two phrases before ordering their meal. The first phrase, “so long”, resulted in diners paying an average of $32 per meal. But when diners recited the phrase “bye bye” before ordering, the average price per meal rose to $45.
Groupthink occurs when well-intentioned individuals make non-optimal or irrational decisions based on a belief that dissent is impossible or on a motivation to conform. Groupthink occurs when members of a group reach a consensus without critical reasoning or evaluation of the alternatives and their consequences.
A stereotype is a fixed and over-generalized belief about a particular group or class of people. These beliefs are based on the false assumption that certain characteristics are common to every individual residing in that group. Many stereotypes have a long and sometimes controversial history and are a direct consequence of various political, social, or economic events. Stereotyping is the process of making assumptions about a person or group of people based on various attributes, including gender, race, religion, or physical traits.
Murphy’s Law states that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong. Murphy’s Law was named after aerospace engineer Edward A. Murphy. During his time working at Edwards Air Force Base in 1949, Murphy cursed a technician who had improperly wired an electrical component and said, “If there is any way to do it wrong, he’ll find it.”
The law of unintended consequences was first mentioned by British philosopher John Locke when writing to parliament about the unintended effects of interest rate rises. However, it was popularized in 1936 by American sociologist Robert K. Merton who looked at unexpected, unanticipated, and unintended consequences and their impact on society.
Fundamental attribution error is a bias people display when judging the behavior of others. The tendency is to over-emphasize personal characteristics and under-emphasize environmental and situational factors.
Outcome bias describes a tendency to evaluate a decision based on its outcome and not on the process by which the decision was reached. In other words, the quality of a decision is only determined once the outcome is known. Outcome bias occurs when a decision is based on the outcome of previous events without regard for how those events developed.
Hindsight bias is the tendency for people to perceive past events as more predictable than they actually were. The result of a presidential election, for example, seems more obvious when the winner is announced. The same can also be said for the avid sports fan who predicted the correct outcome of a match regardless of whether their team won or lost. Hindsight bias, therefore, is the tendency for an individual to convince themselves that they accurately predicted an event before it happened.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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