A Comparative Study Of The Conflict Management Styles Of Chinese And Nigerian Business People

The present study aims at exploring the conflict management styles preferred by Chinese businesspersons and Nigerian businesspersons,and furthermore it examines the differences,as well as the underlying reasons for such differences.Based on Rahim’s dual concern model,people’s conflict management styles are classified into integrating,obliging,avoiding,compromising and dominating,which are adopted as the theoretical framework of the research.Moreover,Rahim’s Organizational Conflict Inventory-II(ROCI-II)form C,which has been tested repeatedly by relevant studies and is found to be rather reliable and valid,is employed as an instrument to test the subjects’ preferences for the five conflict management styles.The research subjects in the present study are all businesspersons who are mainly involved in dealing with large quantities of orders,during which business conflicts are relatively frequent.In the survey,Nigerian participants are asked to fill in the questionnaires of the English version,and Chinese participants are asked to finish those of the translated Chinese version.Most of the questionnaires are paper ones distributed to the subjects and a few of them are sent to the subjects by e-mail.SPSS 13.0 is used to analyze the data,and three major findings are gained through calculating and analyzing statistics from 112 valid questionnaires of the Chinese version and 46 valid questionnaires of the English version.First,Chinese businesspersons present a sequence of preference for conflict management styles: integrating,compromising,avoiding,obliging and dominating,and they tend to favor cooperative styles rather than uncooperative styles.Second,Nigerian businesspersons prefer integrating the most,followed by obliging,avoiding,compromising and dominating successively,and they also tend to choose cooperative styles over uncooperative styles.Third,significant difference is found between Chinese businesspersons and Nigerian businesspersons in their adoption of integrating,obliging and dominating,while the difference in their adoption of compromising and avoiding is not significant.The findings of the research have been interpreted thoroughly by taking various aspects,such as the politics,economy,culture and historical background of the two countries into consideration.The results of the study will give some implications to intercultural communicators,organizations and intercultural training programs.It is suggested that future research can enlarge the size of the samples and conduct more comprehensive surveys to test the findings of the research.It is also suggested that future studies can adopt other assessment instruments to check the generalizability of the results of the study.