Conflict: Situations

This chapter presents an interesting argument that the situational context has a much larger affect on negotiations than personality traits. The situational context can include the social/ political system that you are working in, time constraints, external events, how the issues are framed, where the negotiation occurs (public? media?), and the negotiators’ positions within their group. The author goes on to provide a lot of evidence about this idea that the situation is more important than the psychodynamics. A lot of the criticism of the personality theory involves the inadequacy of personality tests/assessments; these tests do not allow for flexibility of location (i.e. perhaps you are more outgoing at a party than at work, or maybe deciding whether or not you want to go to a party depends on a lot of other factors, not just are you outgoing or not). There needs to be a way to assess behavior within and between situations.


Another major point the author makes is about attribution theory; he says that people over attribute behavior to personality traits rather than taking a step back and thinking about situational influences; this may lead to a conflict spiral by misinterpreting an action and reciprocating in a negative way. Behaviors need to be considered in terms of what role the person is playing, what the organization is like, and how they are defining the situation.


I had a few different thoughts about this chapter. The first was, I felt like some of the situational factors they listed could highly be affected by a personality. For example, if there is a strict time constraint, different people will react differently; some people are more productive working under pressure, and others might feel so pressured to make an agreement that they do not come to the best solution possible. I think that the general size of a negotiation can play a big role in the situation vs. personality debate. If the negotiation is big and people are representing large groups, chances are that the negotiators have been trained in how the organization wants the issues framed, what they will settle for, etc. If it is a negotiation on a smaller scale, for example a community conflict or even mediation, I think that personality will come into play a lot more. If people are not specifically representing a large group, I would imagine that it is harder to separate the conflict from your personal self, and thus personalities would affect the path of the negotiations. All in all, I think that there is an overlap between the situational vs. personality factors, and I think that the size of the negotiation and how distanced the negotiators are from the central conflict can draw out personality factors more than the author acknowledged.