Conflict Competence: Understanding, Assessing and Improving the Ability to Deal with Conflicts

There is a wealth of knowledge, research, books and training programs about skills and techniques of conflict resolution and conflict transformation, however despite of the vast amount of it, conflicts in general are dealt with poorly, even more, oftentimes they are not even recognized as such before it is too late.One of the reasons is that conflicts are for the most part not understood, accepted as part of reality, nor dealt with consciously. Rather than that, people are dealing with conflicts spontaneously, which is in most cases the exact opposite of how they should act.In addition, people generally perceive the conflict as the other person’s fault and themselves as the other’s victim or, when refusing to be a victim, a righteous ‘punisher’. Since the other person responds in the same way, the conflict only escalates. There are, however, individuals, groups and sometimes cultures that have a habit of dealing with conflicts productively, namely using a conflict for progress, growth and the improvement of relationships. And they are, knowingly or unknowingly, treating the phenomenon of conflict differently than others.In general, we can call the characteristic that differentiates people who deal with conflicts productively from the rest, conflict competence. It is not a particular set of skills ‘per se’, but rather a general approach and attitude towards conflict.This book presents a concept of conflict competence as a predisposition for dealing with conflicts productively, proposes and describes a tool for their assessment and gives some general guidelines and suggestions for developing conflict competence.