Towards an integrative framework of conflict-handling behaviour: integrating Western and Chinese perspectives

Abstract

Following in the footsteps of Frances Brew and the late Kwok Leung (1958–2015), we attempt to further integrate the Western dual-concern model of conflict and the Chinese dual-motive model of harmony. Our integrative framework of conflict-handling behaviour is designed to be more comprehensive in its coverage of conflict-handling styles than the integrative model developed by Brew in 2007, and more symmetric in its treatment of the Western and Chinese perspectives than the integrative model jointly developed by Leung and Brew in 2009. In developing our alternative integrative model, we try to take a further step in the process of universalization of an indigenous Chinese theory.

Keywords:

• China: Chinese
• conflict
• integration
• indigenous
• universal
• Western

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Frances P. Brew, two anonymous reviewers, and the editor Professor Malcolm Warner for their constructive comments on our paper. All errors remain ours.

Notes

1. Some scholars deviate a little bit from this five-style approach. Pruitt (1983) accepts all of the five except the compromising style. van de Vliert and Euwema (1994, 674), based on Bales’s (1950) agreeableness and activeness as common factors of modes and taxonomies of conflict behaviour, identify six different conflict styles, i.e. ‘avoiding, accommodating, compromising, problem solving, indirect fighting, and two forms of direct fighting–issue fighting and outcome fighting’.