Investigating the relationship between personality traits and conflict management style among employees during pandemic at Pejabat Setiausaha Kerajaan Negeri Pahang: the mediating role of relationship quality / Khadijah Athirah Mohamad Shamshudin

This research will investigate the relationship between personality traits, relationship quality, and conflict management style among employees during the pandemic at the Secretary of Pahang State Government. Based on the conflict management style, the researcher specifically expected that integrating, obliging, compromising, dominating, and avoiding styles would be related to extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism, which are the five-factor model of personality traits as well as the relationship quality. However, it is questionable how the pandemic crisis's conflict concerns affect personality traits and relationship quality. Based on researcher knowledge, there is limited research on conflict management in organizations during the pandemic because it rarely occurs in Malaysia. The researcher also looked at how relationship quality mediated the relationship between personality traits and conflict management style. To better understand the relationship, this study will develop a framework and analyze how well the model fits the data using the Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) method. A total of 214 respondents from the departments and units in the State of Secretary of Pahang State Government were selected to complete a questionnaire to provide the empirical data for the analysis. The purpose of this research determines how variables in the extended Theory of the Five-factor of Personality Traits and the mediating relationship quality can be tested as a predictor of the conflict management style. All hypotheses were supported in this study with the presence of the mediator showing that personality traits were significantly related to Conflict Management Style. The limitation of this research in terms of scope of research covers
only focusing on the government sector during the pandemic.