PERSONALITY DIFFERENCES: A CAUSE OF CONFLICT
Barbara Landau and Sy Landau
This article was originally printed in the Canadian Bar Association, Ontario ADR
Section News, November 1997, Volume 6, Number 2.

We all possess unique personalities, and these differences add richness to our lives. In fact, we often seek out people whose personalities differ from ours because we admire their positive attributes. What we may not expect is that these personality differences also create tensions and can be important contributors to conflict.

We can examine a variety of human relationships, from marriage to workplace, in order to see that people tend to seek out those whose personalities are different from their own. It is common for people to marry "the holes in their personalities". For example, many people who have very ordered, structured personalities are attracted to partners who prefer to "hang loose" and "go with the flow"; logical, practical thinkers choose emotional, feeling partners; effervescent extroverts are drawn to strong, silent types.

Why? Probably because they see the others being comfortable in situations that make them uneasy, and handling with ease situations that they would find difficult to manage.

In the workplace, too, we try to take advantage of these differences. We recognize that an effective organization requires people who like detailed work as well as those who look at the big picture; creative people as well as analytical ones; people who work best in groups as well as those who think best on their own. Therefore, most organizations hire a broad spectrum of personality types.

Unfortunately, even though we appreciate the value of diverse personalities, we often become intolerant of those whose approaches are too different from our own. People who we once called "organized and structured" are soon thought of as "rigid and inflexible". "Empathetic" people are soon thought of as "bleeding hearts", and so on.

We begin to attribute hostile motives to these people whose personalities are different from ours. If we are outgoing extroverts, we begin to believe that the reason that introverted people are quiet and prefer to work alone is that they are secretive or snobbish. If we are emotional, feeling people, we believe that logical, analytical people do not care about our well being.

In other words, we perceive that people are behaving differently than we do because they harbour unfriendly intentions towards us, and we fear that they are out to block our interests. This perception is the beginning of conflict.

In our work in families and workplaces, we find that a substantial amount of the conflict can be explained by these personality differences. We cannot really alter people's personalities (and we don't try to), but by making people aware of the differences, and by removing the perception of unfriendly motivation from the equation, we find we can increase the level of tolerance and reduce the level of conflict. Even where there are other important issues in conflict, we find we can foster a more cooperative climate by dealing first with these personality differences.

In a future column we will discuss the need to consider personality when trying to resolve conflicts through mediation.