Abstract:

Having conflicts with colleagues or managers is unavoidable for the employees working in an organization. The important aspect is to manage conflicts in a contributing way to the organization. At this point, how the school administrators manage the conflicts they face a lot, whether they have conflict resolution skills, and which conflict resolution strategies they use become critical in an educational and organizational sense. This study, which aims to determine the opinions of teachers about the conflict resolution strategies of school administrators, was carried out with the phenomenology pattern in the qualitative research method, and the study group consisted of 30 teachers with a graduate degree. The study group was selected using the “criterion sampling” method of purposive sampling methods. The data were obtained as a result of online interviews with participants. The analysis of the data was carried out with the content analysis method. According to the data collected, it was concluded that school administrators mostly use the shark method while resolving conflict, followed by the owl, reconciliation/fox, turtle, and teddy bear methods. It has been revealed that there should be common goals, an environment that is open to effective communication, accommodating, respect for individual differences, rewarding, participation in decisions, guiding, working collaboratively, being solution-oriented, sharing trust and shared values considering how the school climate and culture should be for managing the factors that create conflict.

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