A Study on Conflict Handling Styles of Purchasing Professionals

During the progress of purchasing activities, the ways purchasing professionals handle conflicts will influence buyer-supplier relationships. Moreover, ethical purchasing is often considered essential in maintaining the relationships with suppliers. It is necessary to analyze the impact of purchasing professionals’ moral development on conflict handling. Because of the growing numbers of global suppliers, purchasing professionals, who are often exposed to multicultural occasions, are expected to be capable to negotiate with their suppliers to prevent possible conflicts. Since conflict handling is essential for purchasing professionals and moral development and multicultural experiences are likely to be two important factors affecting conflict handling, it is therefore imperative to study the impact of moral development and multicultural experiences on conflict handling styles of purchasing professionals. But there is no research analyzing the impact of multicultural experiences and moral development on conflict handling styles for purchasing professionals. Accordingly, this study takes purchasing professionals in Taiwan as research subjects, uses Rahim's Organizational Conflict Inventory-II to investigate the conflict handling styles of purchasing professionals, uses the Multicultural

Experiences Questionnaire to measure multicultural experiences, and uses the Defining Issues Test to measure the purchasing professionals’ moral development. The findings reveal that purchasing professionals’ conflict handling styles are associated with their moral development and multicultural experiences. This study can contribute to the research on conflict handling of purchasing professionals, and also promote further understanding of conflict handling styles of purchasing professionals.