Insights into Life Skills

How individuals respond to and handle conflict in the workplace is one of the growing areas of interest and concern among scholars and professionals working in a wide range of disciplines. Prior work situated as an effort to understand how training people on conflict theory can manifest behavioral change in the workplace is rare. This evaluation study seeks to explore the link between the constructs of self-awareness and cooperative conflict. The primary aim is to gain a sense of learner s current level of self-reported conflict handling skills and then measure whether the Insights into Lifeskills Project curriculum facilitates the transition to more complex levels. These measures are taken through the use of a primary survey instrument. Post results of a six-week utilization-focused intervention develop an argument that individuals oriented to these constructs are better able to regulate conflict in the workplace through exercising self-awareness and cooperative conflict skills. As a result of explicit instruction in self-awareness skills and conflict response styles, findings report that the participants showed pronounced gains in their ability to handle conflict constructively.