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Personality differences may be a major reason of conflict, as well as the perception of conflict and preference for handling that conflict. This study aims to explore the role of personality traits in determining conflict and performance. The authors also studied the moderated mediated relationship between personality and performance through conflict and conflict management styles.

A field survey was conducted with a sample of 153 employees to test the hypotheses.

As hypothesized, agreeable persons perceive less conflict and extraverts are more likely to use integrating, obliging, compromising and avoiding styles. Emotionally stable people opt for integrating style whereas neurotics opt for dominating style. Conscientiousness, openness and emotional stability have a direct effect on performance, but the interactions between conflict and conflict management styles determine the relationship between personality traits and performance.

The cross-sectional nature of data and somewhat reliable coefficients for personality measures reduce confidence in the results. Future research should use different or multiple measures of personality. Personality traits may be explored in view of the degree of each personality trait or interactions between personality traits.

People are sensitive about engaging in conflict and handling conflict differently because of their personality characteristics. The personality traits should, therefore, be understood and considered for conflict experience, conflict management and performance.

The paper adds to management research by investigating the relationship between personality traits, conflicts, conflict management styles and performance.

The present study examines the relation of individual differences in personality to one's preferences for approaching and managing conflict in work settings. This investigation offers a conceptual foundation for relating the Five‐Factor Model (FFM) of personality to strategy preference, tests strategy‐FFM dimension hypotheses, and explores strategy relations with narrower FFM midlevel traits. Managers and supervisors (N = 249) from public, governmental, and private sector organizations completed the Organizational Communication and Conflict Instrument and the Revised NEO Personality Inventory. Preferences for conflict strategies were found to relate to distinct patterns of FFM dimensions, while narrower midlevel traits provided meaningful insights into the nature of the observed relations.

Conflict in the workplace creates a challenge for many of present day managers. The purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating effect of generations X and Y on the relationship between personality and conflict handling styles.

The study is conducted using a sample of 199 employees working in the electronic retail sector in a non-Western culture. The five-factor model of personality traits is used to measure personality, while conflict styles are measured using Rahim’s Organizational Conflict Inventory II.

Results indicate that generations X and Y moderate the relationship between specific personality traits and conflict handling styles.

This study investigated the moderating effect of generations X and Y on a sample of employees within the electronic retail service sector in Lebanon. It is recommended that future research examine such a relationship in other sectors and cultures for generalizability. Since generation Z (born in the late 1990s) will soon be entering the job market, further studies should include this cohort when investigating the relationships. Finally, for a deeper understanding of the relationship, it is advisable to use both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods.

The understanding of what influences an individual’s choice regarding his/her choice of conflict resolution styles is of great use to supervisors in general and human resource managers in particular. This will assist in developing training programs that help employees acquire the appropriate skills necessary to control their impulses in a conflict situation. Training should comprise conflict resolution and communication skills that could help bridge the gap between generations. Effectively managing generational conflict in the workplace can positively contribute to the level and frequency of future conflicts, which in turn, can lead to favorable organizational outcomes.

Earlier research that examined the relationship between personality and conflict management styles have found varying results ranging from weak to strong relationships. The understanding of what influences an individual’s choice of which management style he/she chooses is of great use for managers in general and human resource managers in particular. This study showed that the inconsistency could be the result of some factors that moderate this relationship. The age of individuals contributes to the strength or the weakness of the various relationships between personality and conflict handling styles. Findings suggest that generations X and Y do not moderate the relationships among the personality traits and the dominating and obliging conflict styles. They do, however, have varying moderating effects on the relationships between specific personality traits and the integrating, avoiding, and compromising styles.

Research examining the relation of personality to conflict resolution strategy has yet to incorporate the dominant, contemporary view of personality, the five‐factor model (FFM). The use of broad traits (domains), to represent personality, although parsimonious, ignores information contained in narrow personality facets, masks important conceptual relations with various strategies, and has produced inconsistent results. The present study demonstrates that narrow, rather than broad, FFM traits consistently explain greater variance in strategy, and account for significant variance when FFM domain scores appear unrelated to the criterion. These effects are shown to result from the unbinding of criterion‐related from criterion‐unrelated facet scores that are otherwise aggregated into broad domains.

This research aims to examine the link between personality, motives, and the choice of conflict resolution strategy in a service conflict context.

Participants' responses to a service conflict scenario were coded into strategy categories and both personality (the Big Five) and motives were measured with established scales. Differences in personality and motives across the strategies were assessed with ANOVA and the relationship between personality and motives was assessed with multiple‐regression.

While the results did not show a direct relationship between personality and choice of strategy, they did indicate an indirect link through motives. The results also show that consumers used a variety of strategies based on a mix of economic and social motives.

The results show that social motives play an important role in business conflicts. The study also supports a multi‐level perspective of personality, where basic tendencies (the Big Five) impact characteristic adaptations (motives), which are more closely related to behavior.

The results suggest that consumer behavior in dealing with conflict can be complex and that service provider cannot rely on “one best way” strategies for dealing with customers. Managers should also be sensitive to the importance that social motives play in conflict resolution, particularly the importance consumers place on fairness.

The paper illustrates how social motives play an important role in business conflicts.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the Big Five personality factors and five styles of handling interpersonal conflict. The Big Five factors are extroversion, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism, and the five conflict styles are integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising. A total of 351 students completed questionnaires. As a check on generalizing the results beyond students, 110 managers also completed the same surveys. The main results indicate that extroversion, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness have a positive relationship with integrating style. Extroversion has a positive relationship with dominating, while agreeableness and neuroticism have negative relationships with dominating. Extroversion, openness, and conscientiousness have a negative relationship with avoiding, while agreeableness and neuroticism have a positive relationship with avoiding. Implications of the study and suggestions for future research are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interactive effect of collective personality fit and its diversity on relationship conflict in a team context.

Data were collected from 1,265 employees and their leaders in 110 work teams in a Korean manufacturing company.

The results show that the two-way interaction between collective personality fit and its dispersion affects relationship conflict in teams. The effect of collective fit on relationship conflict was found to be weaker when the dispersion of collective fit is low than when it is high. This study reports that a high level of collective fit dispersion may help resolve relationship conflict in certain conditions, such as when the level of collective fit is high.

This paper implies that the diverse perception of fit does not always hamper intragroup consonance, and relationship conflict can be reduced as long as the overall level of collective fit is high. The diverse or heterogeneous personalities of team members contribute unique attributes of each member to the success of the team because some members of a heterogeneous team may play the role of filling the gap left by others.

This study argues that collective fit is a new construct, not a simple aggregation of individual fit traits, and the pattern of relationships at the individual level is not replicated at the group level, either conceptually or empirically.

Individual differences cause many differences in human behaviour, and the first source of these differences is personality. In various organisations, employees are encouraged to manage conflict through conflict management styles. The way people think can be an essential factor in their ability to conflict management. Difficult employees are individuals who constantly use problematic communication styles to express their feelings and thoughts to direct the behaviour of others. This empirical study aims to investigate the effect of thinking styles on individuals’ conflict management in dealing with difficult personalities.

To achieve the research purpose, a gamified situation was designed, and a survey was performed in laboratory settings and on an online platform. At first, participants’ reactions were measured in the simulated conflict management situation dealing with difficult personalities; subsequently, the dominant thinking style of participants was measured by the rational-experiential inventory (REI) and the cognitive reflection test. At the end, participants answered a series of demographic questions.

The collected data were then analysed by regression analysis. Based on the findings of this study, the rational thinking measured by the REI40 has a significant and positive effect on the performance of individuals in conflict management with difficult personalities in an organisational context; in other words, rational thinking leads to better performance in conflict management than experiential thinking.

The value of this article lies in the direct study of the impact of thinking styles on conflict management, which was done by focusing on difficult organisational personalities. Also, using gamification in research design is another research initiative.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between personality, gender and interpersonal peacemaking. Peacemaking is considered as voluntary behavior of team members to help conflicting peers in an impartial way, to find an amicable solution. This study tests the relation between the Big Five personality dimensions, gender and five different components of interpersonal peacemaking (general involvement in peacemaking, multipartiality, focus of finding solutions, emotional support and the use of humor).

In total, 503 participants filled out a survey assessing their personality and peacemaking behavior at work. To test the hypotheses, this study conducted structural equation modeling in AMOS 22.0.

In line with expectations, openness, extraversion and agreeableness related positively to most peacemaking components, while conscientiousness and neuroticism related negatively to the use of humor and peacemakers’ multipartiality, respectively; comparing men and women, women engage more often in peacemaking in general and in emotional support, and use less humor than men. Results also showed that these gender differences are partially mediated by agreeableness being higher for women.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is one of the first studies exploring the relationship between personality (Big Five), gender and different aspects of interpersonal peacemaking. Peacemaking is an important, however understudied, behavior in teams and part of OCB. The promotion of peacemaking contributes to team effectiveness.

This study seeks to examine the links between employee agreeableness, group performance, and peers' perceptions of threat of retaliation, through relationship conflict.

In a laboratory setting, 42 groups of undergraduate students (N = 182) from a Pakistani university were assigned to group projects to be completed within four months. Data collected from three different questionnaires at four different times and actual scores awarded by the course instructor to each group were used for the analyses. Based on r_WG(J) and ICC(1), level 1 (182 students') data were aggregated to level 2 (groups), and then analysed using regression analysis followed by Preacher and Hayes' bootstrapping procedure.

Results suggest that high agreeableness predicts group performance positively and peers' perceptions of threat of retaliation negatively. Moreover, relationship conflict among group members significantly mediates the agreeableness-group performance relationship. The above relationships may be sensitive to national culture.

In this study, groups were formed for a few months, whereas in real organizational life, workgroups are formed for different durations. Therefore, the range of situations to which these findings generalize remains an open question.

Agreeableness of group members can be constructive for performance of the group. Managers may utilize this insight while forming groups, and rating performance.

There is dearth of research illuminating how employee's personality traits affect group performance and appraisal ratings. The study tests the effects of employee agreeableness on: (1) group performance, as rated by supervisors; (2) the threat of retaliation, as perceived by peer raters; and (3) the mediating effect of relationship conflict.