Western Individualists
&
Independent Self-Construal

Specific Collaborative Strategies

1. "Practice patience and verbal restraint in articulating their personal interests, goals, and wants"
2. "Use vocal segregates or back-channeling cues such as "uhm, uhm" and Uh-huh" to signal listening attentiveness"
3. "Be open to the expressions of stories, proverbs, metaphors, analogies, and understatements"
4. "Use self-effacing questions to encourage the others to coach you or show you the way"
5. "Address the conflict problem to general team members rather than singling out one person"
6. "Accept longer turn-taking pauses and reflective silences"
7. "Use appropriate head nods to indicate identity affirmation"
8. "Listen to the identity and relational meanings that underscore the conflict content messages"

Specific Collaborative Stategies

1. "Practice verbal assertiveness in articulating their personal interests, goals, and wants"
2. "Use direct verbal responses to indicate agreements, negotiable points, and disagreements"
3. "Articulate clearly the reasons behind the disagreement from either an inductive mode or a deductive logical mode"
4. "Use direct, specific questions to cross-check facts, interests, and unclear goals"
5. "Target the questions to a specific individual"
6. "Learn to engage in overlap talks and faster turn-taking behavior"
7. "Use verbal perception check to paraphrase what you have heard in your own words to prevent misunderstanding"
8. "Listen to the content messages and action plans, as well as the identity and the relational meanings of the content messages"

General Strategies

1. "Be especially sensitive to the images of collectivists as closely tied to ingroup concerns, obligations, status and asymmetrical roles"
2. "Probe deeper into the affective, identity-laden nuances that underlie substantitve, conflict issues"
3. "Engage in proper facework reciprocity to transform collectivists' self-effacing messages into mutual-concern facework interests"
4. "Realize that collectivists are process-oriented in their facework negotiation process"

General Strategies

1. "Pay more attention to the self-face image or personal credibility of individualists"
2. "Recognize that individualists often separate conflict substantive issues from identity-related issues"
3. "Respect the self-directed face concern of individualists in approaching facework issues"
4. "Realize that individualists are closure-oriented in their conflict resolution approach"