Personality Types and Conflict Management Styles

Abstract

In order to identify the relationship between the personality types and conflict management styles of the schools administrators of the province of Bohol, this research was carried out. A total of 158 public secondary schools administrators from the Division of Bohol participated this study. It was assumed that no significant relationship existed between the personality types and conflict management styles; moreover, no significant relationship existed as well between the variables of personality types namely openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism and the variables of conflict management styles namely competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding and accommodating. The participants were asked to accomplish the two scales which are the BFI or the Big Five Inventory to determine their dominant personality types and the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Questionnaire to determine their preferred conflict management styles. Treatment of the data confirmed that most of the participants have conscientiousness as the dominant personality type. Furthermore, results show that the participants preferred avoiding style the most in managing conflict and it showed consistency in all statistical analyses done. Results confirm the null hypothesis through correlations; thus, personality types and conflict management styles have no significant relationship. However, the researcher found out that openness to experience is significantly related to collaborating and avoiding styles. Conscientiousness has significant relationship with competing, collaborating, and avoiding styles. Extraversion is significantly correlated with competing, collaborating, and avoiding styles. Agreeableness has significant relationship with competing, collaborating and avoiding styles. Neuroticism is significantly correlated with avoiding style only. Furthermore, all of the personality types have significant correlation with the avoiding style of managing conflict.