Conflict Handling Styles and Project Manager Effectiveness
Abstract
The purpose of this thesis was to determine the conflict handling styles of effective and less effective project managers. The project managers in this study, both military and civilian, worked in an Air Force matrix organizational structure. Since the study used a hierarchical or 'top-down' and 'bottom-up' approach in order to obtain multiple measures of the project managers' conflict handling styles and effectiveness, it included not only project managers, but their superiors, and the functional personnel who worked with the project managers. The superiors who participated in this study were the organization's senior level managers. Two notes of caution need to be made about this study. (1) the number of project managers was small. This limitation was due to the incompatibility between the amount of time it takes to collect sufficient data from three organizational levels and the short nature of this masters program. (2) the organization chosen was unique in that it was composed primarily of young and relatively inexperienced project managers. This study demonstrates that effective project managers tend to use the integrating style for handling conflicts with their superior, other project managers, and their functional personnel, and that the less effective project managers do not. This finding was based on the superiors' and functionals' perspectives of the project managers styles, not from self reporting. The self reporting of conflict handling styles by effective and less effective project managers resulted in there being no significant differences in the styles they used.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA201492
Entities
People
- Stephen P. Wardlaw
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology