Conflict Management Approaches Principals Adopt For Effective Administration of Secondary Schools in Ebonyi State

This study focused on finding out the conflict management strategies principals adopt for effective administration of secondary schools in Ebonyi State of Nigeria. Two research questions and one hypothesis were formulated to guide the study. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. The population of the study comprised all the two hundred and twenty one (221) principals and three thousand two hundred and eighty five (3, 285) teachers in the 221 public secondary schools in Ebonyi State, Nigeria. Simple random sampling technique was used to select ten (10) teachers from each of the thirty (30) secondary schools used for the study. This gave a total of three hundred (300) respondents as the sample size. Structured questionnaire developed by the researcher was used for data collection. The data collected in respect of the research questions were analysed using mean scores while T-test statistics was used to test the hypothesis. The finding of the study revealed that principals use both intervention and non-intervention conflict management strategies. However, a significance difference was observed in the rating of principals use of the two broad conflict management approaches. Based on the findings, it was recommended that principals should be more concerned with looking for early warning of conflict to address it rather than allowing it to escalate. Also principals should be sponsored by the government to regularly attend conferences to keep themselves abreast of the global best practices in conflict management because of the implication of conflict in school administration.