ABSTRACT
Intercultural conflict frustrations often arise because of our lack of necessary and sufficient knowledge to deal with culture-based conflict communication issues competently. When a second language is involved, the situation may be exacerbated. Our cultural ignorance or ineptness oftentimes clutters our ability to communicate appropriately, effectively, and adaptively across cultural and linguistic lines. As the global economy becomes an everyday reality in most societies, individuals will inevitably encounter people who are culturally different in diverse workplaces and relationship-building situations. Learning to manage such differences mindfully, especially in intercultural conflicts, can bring about multiple perspectives and expanded visions in the conflict-encountering process. This chapter is developed in six sections. The first provides an overview of the contents of the
different sections. The second summarizes three theoretical approaches that hold potential promise for explaining and organizing the complex layers of intercultural conflict issues: social ecological theory, integrated threat theory, and face negotiation theory. The third section discusses critical issues related to the criteria and components of intercultural conflict competence. The fourth addresses the critical role of mindfulness and offers a set of reflective questions to stimulate a mindful transformation process by shifting our ingrained, culture-based conflict assumptions to alternative insights and viewpoints. The fifth section recommends specific identity threat management and facework management strategies to build intercultural conflict competence. The sixth section proffers directions for future theorizing and researching on the motif of intercultural conflict competence. Intercultural conflict is defined in this chapter as the perceived or actual incompatibility of
cultural values, situational norms, goals, face orientations, scarce resources, styles/processes, and/ or outcomes in a face-to-face (or mediated) context (Ting-Toomey and Oetzel 2001). Both the appropriateness and the effectiveness features, together with the interaction adaptability feature, are part of the intercultural conflict competence criteria (Cupach et al. 2010). If inappropriate or ineffective conflict behaviors continue, the miscommunication can very easily spiral into a complex, polarized intercultural conflict situation. More specifically, intercultural conflict competence refers to the mindful management of
emotional frustrations and conflict interaction struggles due primarily to cultural, linguistic, or
ethnic group membership differences. The larger the cultural distance, the more likely the escalatory conflict spirals will spin into an entangled, chaotic mode of biased attributions and defensive emotional reactions. The outcome goal of competent conflict practice is to transform ingrained culture-based conflict knowledge, habits, and skills from an ethnocentric viewpoint to an ethnorelative perspective. Culture, from this backdrop context, is defined as a learned system of traditions, symbolic
patterns, and accumulative meanings that fosters a particular sense of shared identity-hood, community-hood, and interaction rituals among the aggregate of its group members. Both cultural and individual conditioning factors in conjunction with multilayered situational factors shape intercultural conflict competence antecedent factors, process, and outcome.
