An Integrative Model of Personality, Conflict Management Styles and Emotional Labour

Abstract

An Integrative Model of Personality, Conflict Management Styles and Emotional Labour With the rise and progress of service industry, emotional labour has become an inevitable part of organizational life, which has proven detrimental effects for the employee as well as organizational wellbeing. So, the managers try to seek ways to remove or at least decrease emotional labour. This research was an effort to find out ways to overcome this problem. The purpose of this study was to empirically test, the mediating role of relationship conflict and conflict management styles in the relationship between personality and emotional labour. Stratified random sampling technique was applied and gender (male/female) was taken as strata. An analytical and non-experimental research design was used with a randomly selected sample of 450 managers in the banking sector. Structural equation modeling technique was used to analyze the hypothesized model. Good fit of data to the hypothesized model was attained in the final analysis (CMIN/DF = 1.479; GFI = 0.998; AGFI = 0.984; CFI = 0.999; RMSEA = 0.033; NFI = 0.997; TLI = 0.995 and RMR=0.015). The results revealed that conflict management styles fully mediated the relationship between personality and emotional labour and certain conflict management styles had diminishing while others have exacerbating effect upon emotional labour. The results also emphasized the importance of employee’s personality in suggesting his/her emotional labour behaviour. Besides this the findings indicated that personality is a great cause of relationship conflict and at the same time it is a great predictor of the choice of emotional labour strategies, as well as of the choice of conflict management styles. The findings of this study gave an insight to the managers in service organizations to understand that, they should take into consideration, personality traits of a potential candidate while hiring new employees, and emotional labour and personality characteristics of individuals while setting job assignments. It further showed the significance of individual differences such as gender in understanding the differential impact of emotional labour on employees working in service roles. xi Keywords: Conflict management styles, emotional labour, relationship conflict, personality traits, gender, structural equation modeling.