Conflict Management Styles In Educational Organizations

Abstract

Conflict is an inevitable phenomenon in the social and professional life, where different people of different characteristics live and work together. The point is, to provide employees not be affected negatively from conflicts, via managing conflicts as not affecting the organizational climate and organizational balance. Therefore, especially in work life, managing conflicts in professional terms constitute great importance. In this sense, managers carry the greatest responsibility. As for educational organizations, the conflicts and the management of conflicts are of great importance because the organizational climate may affect the students. Educational organizations are among the organizations that have the most different personality traits. At this point, both managers and the teachers carry the responsibility. In order to provide the conflicts to be in the frame of expected level, responsible acts are needed. Thus, educational organizations may develop more. In this context the porpose of this study is to research the conflict management styles that are preferred in educational organizations and the attitudes of teachers towards conflict management. In the scope of the research private primary schools that are active in Burca City Nilüfer province are taken as sample and a survey form that consists demographical questions and Conflict Management Inventory (Rahim, 1983) is delivered to the schools via e-mail. The ethical commission permission of Bursa Technical University with the date and number 21.02.2022-E.8352, is also delivered to the participants. A total of 215 responds are gathered and the gathered data is analysed via SPSS 21.0 package programme. Reliability Analysis, Factor Analysis, Descriptive Analysis, Mann-Whitney U Test and Kruskal-Wallis Test are applied. According to the results, there is not a statistically significant difference between the socio-demographic (gender, age, education, field of study) characteristics of private primary school teachers and their attitudes towards conflict management. Therefore, it can be understood as an implication of the fact that the conflict management styles are not comprehended thoroughly in the sample schools, which implies a suggestion for the school managements for dwelling on conflict management.