The benefits of conflict avoidance in collaboration

Abstract

Conflict management is an important and challenging problem in collaboration. Conflict avoidance is one way to manage conflicts. Intuitively, we may try the best to avoid conflicts when initiating a collaborative activity, because we may save the effort of conflict resolution. However, conflict avoidance is a complex task that requires many efforts. We need to know if we could get a reward from our payment in conflict avoidance. This paper sets up a model to evaluate the collaboration performance before and after conflict avoidance; conducts experiments with simulations; finally conclude the benefits for conflict avoidance. The contribution of this paper is to assert that conflict avoidance is beneficial in most cases unless the conflicts are not severe, there are not many conflicts, and the number of roles is too small.