Conflict management at sport and fitness centers in İzmir province: Analysis of employees' perception

Conflict is an inevitable part of business life. The main aim of this study was to identify the perceptions of fitness center employees about the causes of conflict and conflict management strategies at their workplace. Also, another aim of the study was to detect a possible relationship between the causes of conflict and conflict management strategies. Fitness centers employees are the population of the study. The sample was consisted of employees that work for any fitness center with at least ten employees in İzmir province. Convenience sampling method was used to reach participants. Survey method was used to collect data. There were three parts in the questionnaire form. The first part was personel data form that was formed by the researcher. Organizational Conflict Causes Scale was located in the second part and Rahim's Organizational Conflict Inventory was located in the thirth part. Descriptive Statistics Analysis, Independent-Samples T Test, One-Way ANOVA and Bivariete Correlation tests were conducted via SPSS 24 for data analysis. In conclusion, there is no significant difference found in responses of OCCS (Organizational Conflict Causes Scale) between the groups in terms of their demographic characteristics except by sex. However, there are significant differences between the groups in responses of ROCI-II (Rahim's Organizational Conflict Inventory) by wage, education level, task and seniority in organization. In addition, "The Subdimension of Supervisory Causes" partaking in OCCS and "The Sumbdimension of Integrating partaking in ROCI-II have the highest average scores according to responses of participants. Also, it is found that there are weak and very weak level correlation scores between subdimensions of the research scales. As a result, it was determined that the perceptions of employees of sport and fitness centers about organizational conflict management styles are changeable between independent variable groups but not about organizational conflict causes, especially for this study. Key Words: Conflict, Organizational conflict, Conflict causes, Conflict management.