Abstract

Conflict management behaviors are divided into distributive styles and integrative styles. The former copes with the conflicts competetively, the latter cooperatively. The Conflict Management Program (Lee and Park, 1992), the facilitating process to manage the conflicts integratively, assumed that the cognitive change should be made at least in the three aspects in order that conflict management behaviors are changed into integrative styles: the causes of conflict should be attributed to 'problems' rather than 'person' ; the focus of attention should be transferred from overt 'position1 to covert 'interest' ; the perspectives should be changed from 'personal gain' to mutual gain . To test the validity of these assumptions empirically, two studies were conducted. Study 1 investigated the correlation between three variables in these assumptions and conflict management styles, As a result, while these three variables had no correlation with distributive styles, they had positive correlation with integrative styles. Study 2, through the Conflict Management Training, investigated the cognitive changes about conflict situation by content analysis of clients' verbal responses. Consequently, the clients' conflict management behaviors showed a tendency changing from distributive styles to integrative styles. In addition to these two results, it was supported that the perception changes differentiating person from problem, differentiating position from interest, differentiating personal gain from mutual gain are significant variables in managing conflict integratively.