Cultural Styles of Conflict Management in Japanese and Americans: Passivity,Covertness, and Effectiveness of Strategies1

We asked 94 Japanese and 98 American students to report their recent experiences with interpersonal conflicts; they reported 476 episodes. The content analyses of these episodes were conducted in terms of desired and engaged conflict management strategies, effectiveness of chosen strategies, covertness of conflicts, and motives for covertness. Strategies other than simple avoidance were coded into four types, based on Falbo and Peplau's (1980) model. As a result, a particularly strong tendency to avoid conflict was found among Japanese subjects, who were motivated by both their desire to preserve relationships and their perceptions of shared responsibility. These findings were interpreted in terms of cross-cultural concepts of collectivism versus individualism (Triandis, 1989a) and independent versus interdependent self (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).