DOI: 10.7763/IJIMT.2010.V1.74
Conflict Management Styles: The Iranian General Preference Compared to the Swedish
Abstract—Conflict occurs when needs and desires of two individuals or parties are contradicting, consciously or unconsciously. In other words, conflict happens when parties are not getting what they want. Consequently, proper resolution is inevitable to avoid tensions and stresses that conflict may cause. Awareness of how people generally prefer to deal with conflict in an organization seems extremely crucial for leaders to play their leading role properly.Thomas-Killman Conflict Mode Instrument is broadly implemented to evaluate how people deal with conflict. Assertiveness and cooperation are two key parameters that are used by this instrument to assess people’s preference for how to deal with conflict, resulting in five distinguishable modes: avoiding, compromising, accommodating, competing and collaborating. 36 engineering students and 21 experienced engineers from Iran along with 25 Swedish students answer edquestions of this instrument. Results imply both Iranian naive engineers and experienced engineers mostly prefer to avoid conflict. Similarly, both of them generally showed a lack of interest in competing mode. However, the results indicate that gaining experience intensifies the interest to avoid and disinterest to competing mode. On the other hand, the general preference of Swedish students for dealing conflict purports a profound contradiction with Iranian case showing a great sense of assertiveness rather than cooperativeness. The difference between the Iranian and the Swedish public preference is justified by their cultural dimensions.
Index Terms—Conflict Management style, Thomas-KilmannInstrument
Hossein Khanaki. Author is a graduate of master program of Project Management and Operational Development at KTH Royal Institute of Technology phone: +46-720-834570; e-mail: khanaki@kth.se.
Nasser Hassanzadeh. Co-Author is a graduate of master program of Project Management and Operational Development at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. email: nasserh@kth.se
Cite: Hossein Khanaki, Member, PMI and Nasser Hassanzadeh, " Conflict Management Styles: The Iranian General Preference Compared to the Swedish," International Journal of Innovation, Management and Technology vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 419-426, 2010.