Leadership plays an important role among five main components of management. These days, many organizations try to resolve any existing conflicts through adapting an appropriate leadership strategy. During the past few years, there are increasing interests in examining the relationship between management style and conflict management. The proposed study of this paper performs an empirical study to find the relationship between relationship-oriented leadership style and solution-oriented strategy as well as between leadership style and conflict management. The proposed study distributed a questionnaire among 43 managers who were in different industries in west part of Iran. Most of the people who participated in our survey were male and they were between 25 to 30 years old. The study considers relationship between leadership style and conflict management, which includes the relationship between relationship-oriented and task-oriented leaderships with avoiding conflict management strategy, solution and control based conflict managements. The results confirmed that there is only a meaningful relationship between relationship-oriented leadership with solution-based conflict management. In other words, our survey indicates that when there is a conflict, management can handle the problem using his/her relationship and find appropriate solution to resolve any possible conflict.

Pour, S., Zadeh, A & Barati, E. (2012). An empirical study to measure the relationship between management style and conflict management.Management Science Letters, 2(6), 2249-2254.

Ayoko, O.B., & Callan, V.J. (2010). Teams’ reactions to conflict and teams’ task and social outcomes: The moderating role of transformational and emotional leadership. European Management Journal, 28(3), 220-235.

Byrne, G.J., & Bradley, F. (2007). Culture's influence on leadership efficiency: How personal and national cultures affect leadership style. Journal of Business Research, 60(2), 168-175.

Cronbach, L. J. (1951). Coefficient alpha and the internal structure of tests. Psychometrika, 16(3), 297-334.

Cummings, G.G., MacGregor, T., Davey, M., Lee, H., Wong, C.A., Lo, E., Muise, M., & Stafford, E. (2010). Leadership styles and outcome patterns for the nursing workforce and work environment: A systematic review rticle. International Journal of Nursing Studies, 47(3), 363-385.

Hoozée, S., & Bruggeman, W. (2010). Identifying operational improvements during the design process of a time-driven ABC system: The role of collective worker participation and leadership style. Management Accounting Research, 21(3), 185-198.

Likert, R. (1932). A Technique for the Measurement of Attitudes. Archives of Psychology, 140, 1–55.

Klein, K.J., Knight, A.P., Ziegert, J.C., Lim, B.C., & Saltz, J. L. (2011). When team members’ values differ: The moderating role of team leadership. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 114(1), 25-36

Menguc, B., & Auh, S. (2008). Conflict, leadership, and market orientation. International Journal of Research in Marketing, 25(1), 34-45.

Mäkilouko, M. (2004). Coping with multicultural projects: the leadership styles of Finnish project managers. International Journal of Project Management, 22(5), 387-396.

Nauman, S., Khan, A.M., & Ehsan, N. (2010). Patterns of empowerment and leadership style in project environment. International Journal of Project Management, 28(7), 638-649.

Randeree, K., & El Faramawy, A.T. (2011). Islamic perspectives on conflict management within project managed environments. International Journal of Project Management, 29(1), 26-32.



Corresponding author. Tel: +98-9132218436

E-mail addresses: abakhshizadeh@ymail.com (A. Bakhshi Zadeh)

© 2012 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi: 10.5267/j.msl.2012.05.019