Gender and Organizational Conflict Management: The Mediating Role of Personality

Abstract

Many authors examined the interplay between gender and conflict management preferences, but those findings were often mixed and inconsistent. In the current paper, we tried to explain those inconsistencies by investigating the mediating role of personality for the relationship of gender and conflict management. Rahim’s inventory was used for identifying five conflict management styles, and the Big Five Model theory was a base for assessing participants' personality traits. In an online survey, data were collected from a sample of 1,055 working Poles (52.7% women). Based on the structural equation modeling, we detected multiple indirect mediating paths of gender on conflict management via personality traits, while no direct effect of gender was observed. Despite some limitations, the study sheds light on the role of gender in conflict behavior and the importance of personality traits in conflict management, both from a theoretical and practical perspective.