Conflict Management Style Preference:an Empirical Study On Employees Of Different Ownership Structures

The way to effectively manage conflict has attracted both domestic and foreign researchers’attention for a long period. To dig out an individual’s conflict management style is essential to recognizing and understanding conflict management. In spite of massive studies on conflict management style of Chinese people, little attention is paid to the influence of ownership structures on the employees’preference of the conflict management style. In current China, three major ownership structures of enterprises play an important role in the business world. Among them, foreign-invested and private enterprises have been developing at an amazing pace. Meanwhile, state owned enterprises have come through transition after reform and opening-up. Therefore, the consideration of the conflict management style of employees in different ownership structures of enterprises can provide a more comprehensive picture to understand the conflict management in China.The theoretical framework of this study is on the basis of Conflict Management Style Inventory-ROCI-Ⅱ(Rahim,1983), and face concerns (Ting-Toomey and Oetzel,2001), and individualism vs. collectivism (Cai and Fink,2002). And an empirical research was launched to answer three research questions:1) What conflict management style will the Chinese employees prefer to adopt?2) What are the conflict management style Chinese employees tend to adopt in respect to different ownership of enterprises?3) How do face concern and IC influence adoption of conflict management styles? The present study quantitatively measures the conflict management style of employees in different ownership structures and analyzes the role of the face concern and individualism vs. collectivism when employees are in conflict with peers at workplace.Major findings are as following:Firstly, among the five conflict management styles designed by Rahim (1983), the overall preference of the conflict management style for Chinese employees is integrating, and the compromising scores the second highest followed by avoiding and obliging. The dominating is the least likely style employees will take in the conflict situation.Secondly, the style of employees from specified ownership structure featuring SOEs, FIEs, and PEs presents the same preference of integrating and reluctance of dominating. However, SOEs employees saliently differ from the FIEs and PEs employees in terms of obliging and avoiding with lower scores. This finding indicates that employees from SOEs are less likely to be obedient to peers and avoid the conflict than employees from FIEs and PEs.Thirdly, face concern differs in different ownership structures. There is difference between employees from SOEs and that from FIEs in terms of mutual-face and other-face concern, while no difference has been found between SOEs and PEs and between FIEs and PEs in respect to self-face concern. And the mutual-face concern scores the highest for employees from all three ownership structures respectively, which is consistent with the preference of integrating for all employees in conflict situations, because integrating is a conflict management style which reflects high concern for both self and others.Fourthly, face concern is a significant predictor for the conflict management style. At large, the mutual-face concern has significant relationship with obliging, avoiding, integrating and dominating style, self-face is saliently correlated with avoiding style, and other-face concern can predict dominating well. Nevertheless, there is no obvious relation between face concern and compromising. Fifthly, statistical analysis proved that the IC varies in terms of different ownership structures. Encountering conflict with peers, FIEs employees are less collectivistic than SOEs ones, because the Western influence could make employees more individualistic. And there is correlation between face concern and IC. The more collectivistic is, the more mutual-face and other-face concern will be. Therefore, mutual-face and other-face concern can serve as good predictors for IC.Sixthly, IC can prominently predict the conflict management style. In detail, IC is positively correlated to compromising and integrating style, and negatively correlated to dominating. Namely, the more collectivistic employees are the more compromising and integrating style and the less dominating style will be.To shed some new light on this issue, this study aims to dig out how conflict is managed by employees from different ownership structures in mainland China. It hopes that the findings of this study will strengthen the cognition of the impact of two factors (the face concern and individualism vs. collectivism) on the conflict management and the conflict management style of employees in different ownership structures.