Kültür ve bağlamın yüksek öğretim kurumlarında çalışan akademisyenlerin çatışma yönetimi tercihlerine etkisi

This study investigated how the conflict management process preferences of academics changed in five different conflict scenarios, namely value, relationship, structural, interest, and data conflicts, and explored how these preferences were related to participants' cultural values such as Horizontal Individualism, Vertical Individualism, Horizontal Collectivism and Vertical Collectivism. In this way, it is aimed to contribute to the management and resolution of the conflicts experienced by academics and to the implementation and development of effective and efficient conflict management systems in higher education institutions. Participants were 1925 (1017 females and 902 males) academics with salient collectivistic tendencies working in 199 universities from 79 different cities in Turkey. Through an online questionnaire, the cultural values of academics were collected. Then, they rated to what extent each of the ten different conflict management processes were proper in management of the five different types of conflicts given in the scenarios. The results indicated that horizontal collectivism was positively related to the appropriateness scores of interest-based processes, namely negotiation, transformative mediation, peer mediation, evaluative mediation, interest-based mediation and ombuds. On the other hand, the vertical individualism was positively related to appropriateness scores of rights-based processes, namely litigation, arbitration, internal grievance and external grievance. Ombuds and arbitration were found to be mixed-motive processes since they were related to more than one dimension of culture. The scores given for appropriateness of the processes changed significantly with the change of the conflict scenario. Mean scores of conflict management processes followed certain traits with respect to conflict type. Litigation and external grievance scores followed similar traits. Similarly, transformative mediation, negotiation, peer mediation and evaluative mediation mean scores followed similar traits. However the traits of change for interest-based and rights-based processes were quite different from each other. Transformative mediation emerged as the most appropriate process for management of all of the conflicts given in scenarios and this was followed by peer mediation. On the other hand, lowest scores were obtained for external grievance and litigation indicating that these methods were perceived to be inefficient by academics in management of the interpersonal conflicts given in the scenarios.