A Roles Approach: Modeling Individual and Cultural Differences in Conflict Strategies.

This paper proposes a roles approach to conflict strategies. Individuals in a conflict are considered to enact both general and situated roles of themselves and to respond to the other person's role behaviors. Obligation from the general role is proposed to explain both individual- and cultural-level differences in conflict strategies by constraining individuals' embracement of their situated roles and by altering the relative importance of goals. The other person's negative violation of role expectation is proposed to predict relational disruptive conflict behaviors through anger. The current roles model contributes to the communication literature by 1) identifying an aspect of the relationship that may result in greater focus on relational concerns than conflict issues, 2) isolating the predicting effect from the general relational and cultural variables, 3) integrating both motivational and reactive conflict processes, and 4) capturing the communicative nature of conflict situations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]