Accommodation Processes
When individuals engage in a negative action, their partner’s initial inclination is to respond in kind. However, when individuals care about the future of their relationship, they often stifle destructive responses and act constructively.
Conflict researchers have investigated these accommodative responses, and recent scholarship has extended knowledge in two ways.First, researchers have focused on how accommodation processes are associated with dependency dilemmas with close relationships. When partners confront one another about provocative actions, individuals who are highly dependent on their partners may feel they have little control and influence over the interaction (Overall & Sibley, 2007). Consequently, dependent partners face a dilemma. On one hand, their lack of relative power may cause them to feel less valued by their partners, and they may begin to question why they are in the relationship, but on the other hand, their dependency might prompt them to want to act in a way that promotes their relationship. Dependent partners might successfully resolve the dilemma by responding in an accommodative manner to their partner’s interference. In that way, they do not endanger the relationship, and voicing their concerns may prompt a positive or at least less negative reaction from the partner. Among dependent partners, those who engaged in accommodation reported greater acceptance from their partners and greater intimacy in the interaction than did those who did not accommodate. However, when individuals reported a great deal of influence and control within an interaction, accommodation was unrelated to perceptions of the interaction. Thus, possessing power increases positive impressions, but among dependent partners, reacting in an accommodative fashion is associated with more positive impressions than reacting in a destructive manner.
Second, researchers have also investigated whether accommodation processes are influenced by culture and self-construal.
Yum (2004) studied the degree to which members of col- lectivistic cultures engage in accommodation to a greater extent than do those from individualistic cultures and whether a member’s self-construal (how individuals relate to the group to which they identify) influence accommodation. Yum recruited samples from South Korea, Hawaii, and the mainland United States and asked them about how they responded to relational problems. Small cultural differences were observed with Koreans, and Hawaiians reported greater use of neglect than U.S. mainlanders. With regard to self-construal, individuals who were bicultural (i.e., felt both independent and interdependent with their culture) reported greater use of loyalty and less use of neglect than did individuals who were marginal (i.e., felt neither independent nor interdependent of the culture), independents (i.e., felt independent of the culture), or interdependent (i.e., felt strongly connected to the culture). Self-construal was not significantly related to voice or exit. Thus, cultural effects were only observed for the use of neglect, and self-construal effects were only evident for loyalty and neglect. This pattern indicates that culture and self-construal are only related to the passive components of accommodation. The degree to which individuals openly voice their concerns or leave the relationship appears to be independent of culture and self-construal. Thus, research focused on accommodation has continued and provide a more refined view of when it occurs.