How Emotionally Intelligent Frontline Manager Handles Conflict Through Varied Leadership Styles

In today's global organizations,employees are considered,as an asset of group oriented work environments and being a team player in this context is becoming a norm.Individuals working in-group structure with unique perspectives,working styles and skills that normally result in conflict,a natural and complex phenomenon with several influences factors from its escalation to resolution.Harmony amongst employees in an organization is vital for its success.However,getting along with coworkers has never been easy because conflicts at workplace are common.When conflict erupts,parties are directly endowed in outcome of project that may provoke emotional reaction which results in varied reactions like anger,frustration and surprise,it is a prerequisite of a frontline manager to manage subordinate's emotions and resolve such relationship conflicts.Frontline management refers to second and first level staff that is responsible for the supervision of employees and the production of goods and services.In private industry of Pakistan,a frontline manager is a leader who is responsible for a work group,where employees working under him or her do not have leadership roles.They respond to problems by harmonizing misunderstandings,easing tensions,and resolving them through punishment,reward,encouragement,and support at workplace.In conflict situation,it is important to consider individual's affective ability to generate or change the emotional atmosphere of workgroup.Emotional reaction of one group member can shift the momentum and emotional toxicity that may results in change of overall group mood.Compromise,avoid or oblige,dominate or integrate,a conflict may be handled in many ways;conflict management research is person-situation interaction.The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the relationship between the leadership styles of frontline managers and relationship conflicts,with the moderating effect of emotional intelligence on its relationship and investigating a mediation effect of five conflict-handling styles.Private sector of Pakistan has been the focus of this dissertation.Three major promising industries were selected for data collection;textile industry,telecom industry and banking industry.A paper questionnaire was used to collect data from frontline managers of private industry.A random sampling and convenience sampling technique was used.From all three sectors of the private industry,a total of 900 frontline managers were contacted and asked to respond to a questionnaire.Data were analyzed using validity and reliability tests,common bias method,exploratory factor analysis,confirmatory factor analysis and structure equation modeling.SPSS 23 and PROCESS macros software were used to test and verify latent hypotheses.Few major findings of the dissertation are;leadership styles of frontline manager are directly associated with relationship conflict and emotional intelligence can help to control the conflict situations caused by negativity.Transformational leadership is an effective and facilitative style that provides satisfaction and motivation for subordinates.Transformational leaders with high degrees of emotional intelligence are better at manipulating and utilizing emotions and are more experienced in occupational objectives.Transactional leaders can also address such conflicts that occur around them through emotional intelligence.In private industry,managers must solve problems on their own because of the current unviable human resource practices,whereby managers encounter a high rate of employee turnover and feel responsible for this.Significantly,the compromise style helps to promote healthy working relationships by maintaining harmony among workers.This dissertation contributes to prior work on leadership and conflict management.The conceptual similarities and differences among different leadership styles that are used to overcome relationship conflict have postulated by promoting a theoretical model that investigates emotional intelligence,industrial leaders used to handle emotions and how leaders use conflict handling styles in collaboration with leadership styles to manage conflict in the Pakistani private industry.In this regard,the study is the first in its field.One conclusion that can be derived is that successful frontline manager must be able to use various conflict management styles.They should also be able to understand the emotions that arise in conflicts and be perceptive and must have ability to foresee conflicts.Training and development can be used to enhance frontline managers' abilities that may result in improve interpersonal interactions.