Conflict management styles with peers at work: Gender and levels of education differences

Abstract

There is currently a growing need for workers, at different levels, to learn and develop new behaviors, namely regarding interpersonal relationships with co-workers. This article focuses on styles of handling interpersonal conflict between peers in an organizational context. In order to evaluate interpersonal conflict handling styles, the ROCI-II Rahim Organizational Conflict Inventory was used in a sample of 181 subjects from a Portuguese organization. The main goal is to deepen knowledge about interpersonal conflicts handled by peers themselves, determining to what extent handling styles are determined by demographic variables - sex and level of education. The results indicate a greater predominance of the integrating and compromising styles, and that obliging, avoiding and dominating styles are less frequent. The subjects, whether they are men or women, share a very similar position regarding conflict handling. Subjects with higher levels of education qualifications are less avoidant. Being more than just a succession of categorical conclusions, this study intends to draw attention to the need for organizations to accept that conflicts are a consequence of social interaction itself, and that, beyond legitimate, they are inevitable, and therefore must be handled and not resolved or mitigated.