Research in culture and conflict management often examines differences between individualist, low-context cultures and collectivist, high-context cultures. As you learned in Chapter 5, individualist cultures emphasize personal needs, rights, and identity over those of the collective or group, whereas collectivist cultures emphasize group identity and needs. In addition, you’ll recall that people rely more on indirect verbal messages and nonverbal communication than on what is actually said in high-context cultures. In low-context cultures, people are expected to be more verbally direct and say what they mean.

When applied to conflict, European Americans tend to take an individualist and low-context approach, whereas Latinos and Asians are more collectivist and high context (Ting-Toomey & Oetzel 2002). European Americans, for example, tend to view conflict as a necessary way to work out problems and feel that specific conflict issues should be worked out separately from relational issues. For Latinos and Asians, on the other hand, conflict is perceived as having a negative effect on relational harmony, and conflict issues cannot be divorced from relationships. Indeed, cross-cultural research finds that people living in high-context cultures (for example, India and Thailand) prefer to avoid conflict altogether or give in to the other person’s wishes, whereas people in low-context cultures (for example, the United States and Ireland) prefer to engage in conflict more openly and competitively (Croucher et al., 2012). In addition, communication during conflict in individualist, low-context cultures is expected to be clear and direct, whereas in collectivist, high-context cultures, people are supposed to pick up on subtle cues and vague verbal messages (Merkin, 2009). Understanding these important cultural distinctions can help us understand how confusion, frustration, and miscommunication can happen when conflict arises.