The Relationship Between Personality Trait And Conflict Management Strategy In The Workplace: Conflict Level As A Moderator

Conflict is inevitable in the workplace. There were many researches using personality to predict conflict management strategies, however most of them neglect the factor of conflict situation, such as conflict level. Different conflict level can create different stimulus to employees, thus influence their preference for conflict management strategy. In order to gain in-depth knowledge of employees’ conflict managing behavior at workplace, nearly a thousand Chinese employees from all over the country are investigated, the connection between conflict level, employees’ personality trait and their conflict management strategies are tested.In the study, we use the Big Five theory to measure the personality traits of respondents, including five dimensions named neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness; the five conflict management strategies are forcing, yielding, avoiding, problem solving and compromising, which is a set of names applied in the workplace study; conflict level are measured by asking the frequency of both task conflict and relationship conflict which are experienced by employees. In the data analysis, the reliability of the major scales is examined. Then correlation analysis and regression analysis are conducted. Personality trait is the independent variable, conflict management as dependent variable, and conflict level is moderator. The result shows that, among respondents, openness is positively related with problem solving, as well as avoiding strategy; conscientiousness is positively related with problem solving, as well as avoiding strategy; introversion is negatively related with problem solving; neuroticism is negatively related with problem solving, as well as avoiding strategy; the negative relationship between neuroticism and problem solving as well as avoiding are moderated by conflict level; the negative relationship between introversion and problem solving are moderated by conflict level.