FACTORS INFLUENCING INTEGRATING CONFLICT MANAGEMENT STRATEGY AMONG UNIVERSITY TEACHERS: AN EVIDENCE FROM SRI LANKA

Abstract

Conflicts are unavoidable in any organizations since it is a natural, everyday phenomenon in each individual, each group or organization. It can be arised at anytime and anywhere in personal, academic and professional life. Though it is impossible to avoid, it is possible to manage. If it is not managed effectively it leads to increase the stress, reduce the organizational performance and negatively impacts on health and comfort of emp loyees.There are five different conflict management strategies such as forcing, integrating, compromising, obliging and avoiding those are being mostly used in organizations or personal life when conflict arises. Among these five strategies, integrating is the effective strategy which increases the individual performanceand organizational performance. The objective of this study is to find out the factors influencing on integrating conflict management strategy among university teachers. For this study the primary data were collected from randomly selected 1197 permanent academic staff by using the structured questionnaire from all 15 state Universities in Sri Lanka. The collected data were analyzed by using the Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Results of this study revealed that there are four factors such as (1) Investigate an issue with others (2) Minimize the difference among others (3) Emotional support to others (4) Trust others are influencing to apply the integrating strategy when the academic staff falls in conflict. Further, researchers suggested that those who wish to reduce the stress and create the peaceful environment within the organization and their personal life need to investigate an issue with others, minimize the difference among others, provide emotional support and trust others.