Hi. I'm Julie Tietz, and welcome to Conflict Resolution-- Putting the Pieces Together. Today we're going to cover the collaborating conflict style. So let's get started. You can see here that the collaborating style on our conflict styles graph places high in cooperativeness and high in assertiveness. So let's define some of the other terms here before we go into more depth on collaborating.
Assertiveness-- behavior in which a person confidently makes a statement without need of proof, affirming his or her rights without attacking another's. Cooperativeness-- behavior in which two parties work in concert to achieve their mutual and respective individual goals. So going back to our graph, we have cooperativeness here and assertiveness here. And that is placed on the axes of our graph with low and high placement, depending upon the conflict style.
So collaborating-- that's a conflict resolution style in which parties work jointly to try to meet all of each other's needs. So here, again, we have collaborating with high cooperativeness and high assertiveness. So here, we are willing to work with others and we are really adamant about meeting our needs and the other's needs.
Collaborating conflict style works to meet all the needs of the parties in conflict. Let's use some examples of collaborating conflict style. One could be in policymaking. Sometimes government likes to or needs to get the public input on certain issues, and has to bring together various stakeholders on a particular issue to make policy surrounding-- and so here they work through a process to figure out what all the needs are to come to some sort of resolution. This is also known as collaborative governance.
Or it could be within a work partnership. Let's say that two teams are merging and they possibly have worked very differently when they were independent of each other. And so now they have to figure out what both of their needs are so they can work together more effectively and to avoid conflict in the future.
With each of these conflict styles, there are positive and negative outcomes, and that is resolutions to a conflict that a party perceives as meeting his or her needs and/or reducing likelihood of further conflict-- that's a positive outcome-- or not meeting his or her needs and/or increasing likelihood of further conflict. That is a negative outcome. So let's look at some examples here.
Positive of a collaborating style is a win-win outcome. Everyone gets their needs met, so everyone's happy. And who doesn't like that kind of outcome? And we could be solving the actual problem at hand. When we address the needs of everyone and they're all met, then there isn't a problem anymore, and it's less likely for the conflict to arise again.
And we're building stronger relationships. When we're getting to know what others needs are and they're getting to know what our needs are, we're building trust, and therefore building stronger relationships with one another. Negative outcomes of the collaborating style could be it's time-consuming. It takes a lot of time to figure out what everyone's needs are to fully address them.
And it takes a full commitment. You have to be fully invested in collaborating, and sometimes we don't have the energy, or the time, or the want to go through that. So now that we've covered the collaborating style of conflict, let's go over our key points. Remember that all people are capable of using all of the different conflict styles that are on our graph, but we tend to lean towards applying our preferred style in most conflict situations.
Collaborating conflict style is where all needs of both parties are met, and there are positive and negative outcomes to this. Positive could be win-win. Everybody gets what they want and everyone's happy and satisfied.
Negative could be it's time-consuming, and we may not have the energy, or the time, or the want to go through this type of process and getting to know what all of the needs are and fully addressing everything. Thank you for taking the time out to view this tutorial, and I hope to catch you again next time.
Overview
Introduction
Cooperativeness & Assertiveness
Collaborating Conflict Style
Examples of Collaborating Conflict Style
Positive & Negative Outcomes
Examples of Positive & Negative Outcomes
Conclusion
Source: Image of Public Meeting, Public Domain, http://mrg.bz/N0h20Q; Image of Business Partners, http://mrg.bz/1EbjtN Public Domain,