Horizontal and vertical cultural differences in the content of conflict styles

Abstract

Cultural differences often result in conflict and thus require careful consideration, because unmanageable conflicts significantly affect organisations' effectiveness. On the other hand, if conflicts in the organisations absent, it leads to its stagnation. The study aims to determine whether conflict management styles (CMSs) as specific behavioural patterns that individuals prefer to employ when dealing with conflict are correlated with horizontal and vertical dimensions of individualism and collectivism. The research design following the purpose of the study utilised a quantitative design. An online questionnaire survey was used to obtain data. The survey was conducted during October 2018 with 160 managers of Slovak small and medium IT start-ups as the respondents. We employed the 28 items Rahim Organisational Conflict Inventory-II scale (ROCI-II) and 32 items Signelis et al. (1995) scale. The response format was the seven-point Likert scale with 1 representing strongly disagree and 7 representing strongly agree. The alpha coefficients (ROCI-II 0.8963 and Signelis et al. (1995) scale 0.8641) suggested relatively high internal consistency. Results showed significant links between cultural dimensions of individualism and collectivism and adopting conflict styles. Integrating style strongly correlates with horizontal individualism (0.6607) and collectivism (0.7433). Obliging style strongly correlates with horizontal collectivism (0.6182). Compromising style strongly correlates with horizontal individualism (0.6032) and collectivism (0.6033). Other relationships were found, but their meaning requires further study. The practical implications of research suggest that managers should consider cultural differences in conflict management when diagnosing and intervening in conflict situations. Future research may address these issues of CMSs and their impact on company performance. © Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, ECIE 2019. All rights reserved.