Impact of Conflict Management Styles on Team Performance: An Empirical Study on Supervisors of Teams in Universities
This study investigates the impact of conflict management (CM) styles on team performance. Conflict Management was conceptualized in terms of five styles: avoiding, integrating, dominating, obliging and compromising. Team performance, on the other hand, was operationalized in terms of team cohesion, team communication, innovativeness, and quality. Five hypotheses regarding the impact of each dimension of CM on team performance were postulated. Gathering data via a questionnaire developed for this study from a sample consisted of 231 employees working at 40 teams in Twenty universities selected from 4 regions. Participants in the work sites were visited by the researcher’s assistant to collect data and ensure a high response rate. Two hundred and fifty questionnaires were administered by hand, and 231 were returned completely. Using SPSS and AMOS, research data were entered, coded, analyzed and plotted. The results showed that three conflict management styles (integrating, obliging and compromising) had significant positive effects on team performance while two styles (avoiding and dominating) had significant negative effects on team performance. In light of these results, the study recommended that the conflict should not be ignored or resolved in a way that suits one of the parties to the conflict and at the expense of the other party. The interests of both parties must be taken into account.
