Conflict Management Styles and Personality Attributes of the Southeast Asian School Managers

Abstract

School managers have to manage conflict in a way that most benefits the organization and do the least harm to conflicting parties (Gannon 1979). A manager brings his people and personality to his office. This theory signifies the indispensability of one’s personality to a leader’s performance in his official job (Davis and Newstrom 1995). This descriptive survey-correlation method of research tried to find out which conflict management styles relate significantly to the personality attributes of the Southeast Asian school managers. The findings may serve as a feedback as to how this group of school managers manages conflict in certain situations and as a partial basis for assessment to determine their conflict management styles and personality attributes. The result indicated non-significant differences between their conflict management styles used in each of the five areas of concern which was established based on the computed value of the Phi-Coefficient since there were only two conflict management styles expressed by them in each area of concern namely, Integratingand Forcing. Point-Biserial Correlation Coefficient resulted to significant relationships between their conflict management styles and personality attributes since conflict management styles of Executive Position and Career have significant relationships with Selfesteem and Risk taking personality attributes. Keywords - Conflict management, personality attribute, educational administration, organizational conflict, and organizational management.