I feel like I often would prefer to get the merge conflict. So many times my coworkers will somehow mess up the code I committed when resolving the conflict.
Rebase all of your work branches onto HEAD so that conflicts require refactoring the first commit where things don't match up. This can make conflicts easier to deal with (in my humble opinion) since you deal with conflicts earlier in your commit history as opposed to at the end after ALL of your changes are made.
Plus a linear history is super nice to work with later on.