Conflict Managenemt In Dendi Woreda Secondary Schools, West Shoa Zone

Abstract

The main purpose of this study was to describe conflict management strategies in Dendi Woreda governmental secondary schools. In order to meet the objectives of the study, a descriptive research design was employed. From the total population of 186 teachers; 127 teachers were included in the study by using simple random sampling technique and 5 school principals, 5PTA`s chairman, and 2 supervisor were purposely selected for this study. Questionnaire, interview, and document review were used for data collection. The data obtained through questionnaire were analyzed using SPSS version 20 .0 software to calculate F ratio, mean, standard deviation, and percentage. Regarding the views, the findings of the study revealed that conflict has positive and negative outcomes and dynamic process in its nature in secondary schools. Dissatisfaction with the decisions made by the school administration, dissatisfaction for working on tasks and improper fixation of motivational and reward processes by school leaders ,the way school leaders (principals) communicate with stakeholders, unclear school rule and regulations and their improper implementations as well as absence of schools guidelines, lack of professional skills of team leaders to support their members, unfair treatments and relationships of individuals in the same department and unfair teachers’ evaluation performance appraisal, lack of assign responsible person in right position, having unequal attitude toward teachers, bad work environment, lack of participatory decisions, teachers' resistance to change are causes of conflict in secondary schools include your study site. The study found that that avoiding, accommodating, and compromising conflict management strategies are frequently practiced in the schools than collaborative and competing conflict management strategies. Forcing style and problem solving conflict resolution strategies are frequently used than smoothing method in the schools. Conflict resolution skills practiced in the schools studied were finding the root cause of conflict and taking corrective action, perceive issue positively, participating teachers, dominating the other party in conflict resolution, and using convincing rules and regulation in the schools. As a result, the study concludes that violation of school rules and workplace ethics, workloads and unfair period allocation and distribution, employee benefit-related matters, and unreasonable absence from workplace were the major causes of conflicts in the schools under study. It also concludes that the practices of conflict management in the schools were bound with several challenges. Hence, lack of trained conflict settlers, absence of suitable conflict resolution guideline and lack of commitment to resolve conflicts were challenges to the practices of conflict resolution. Besides, mediators’ intuitive behavior, misunderstanding and negative attitudes between parties were among the challenges of conflict management in the schools. Moreover, interpersonal, intergroup and intra-group conflicts were common types of conflicts arisen in the schools. When the conflicting situation was found to be discipline related case, the strategy used to resolve the conflict was by applying the provisions stipulated in the school administration and discipline guideline. The researcher recommended that leaders have to be skillful enough to choose the right conflict resolution approach that can satisfy a particular conflict situation.