Personality types of university administrators and organizational conflict resolution styles

A descriptive-correlational study is conducted to explore and describe conflictresolution styles, identify personality type traits, and examine the relationshipsbetween personality type traits and conflict resolution styles as well as selectedthirteen demograpfic characteristics of the university administrators working in theten Turkish universities . The purpose of this study is to determine the relationshipsbetween personality type traits and conflict resolution styles of universityadministrators.Study participants were the 349 university administrators within AegeanRegion; completed self-report survey fonus were obtained from these. Of the 349individuals that provided data, the majority (81.4 percent) were male whereas lessthan one-fourth (18.6 percent) were female.The Questionnaries used were Rahim's (1983) the Rahim OrganizationalConflict Inventory II-C and Alden's (1990) the Inventory of Interpersonal ProblemslIP. All completed questionnaries were coded and input into the SPSS statisticalpackage, version 11.0. In order to analyze the data collected for this study, severalstatistical techniques such as descriptive statistics, percentage, arithmetic mean, standartdeviation, t tests, bivariate correlations and hierarchical multiple regression analyseswere used.XVISome of the findings were as follows: The study revealed that conflictresolution styles of integrating, compromising, obliging, dominating and avoidinghave equal importance for the administrators. The study found that integrating wasthe most frequently used conflict resolution style and compromising was the secondmost frequently used conflict resolution style. The female and male participants usedthe same conflict styles. Of the population, the majority was of the "self-sacrificing"personality type trait. The "exploitable" and "intrusive" personality type traitsaccounted for the second largest percentage of administrators. Correlations betweenconflict resolution styles and personality type traits revealed that the "selfsacrificing"has a high correlation with the integrating and obliging conflictresolution styles. The "domineering" was shown to have a high correlation with thedominating conflict resolution style. When the personality type traits are analyzedone by one, it was observed that the personality trait "self-sacrificing" has importanteffect on integrating conflict resolution style, and the personality trait "domineering"has important effect on dominating conflict resolution style when confronted with aconflict situation.