Interpersonal Conflict and its Effect on Employee Performance Among Saudi Arabia Commercial Banking Sector

Abstract

Most organizations are relying on employees for success and competitiveness. At most times, the performance of employees is adversely affected by conflict situations. Recently, interpersonal conflict considered to be a critical aspect of employees performance. In order to improve employee performance of private commercial banks, it is necessary to improve harmony, develop a favorable relationship and mitigate the conflict between employees. This study focuses on analyzing and exploring the impact of interpersonal conflicts on employee performance in private commercial banks in Saudi Arabia. A causal descriptive survey research design was adopted. The target population was private commercial banks’ employees while the sample size was 247 randomly selected using simple random sampling. Structured questionnaires were the method used to collect data based on the research questions. The data from the questionnaire were analyzed in order to test the impact of interpersonal conflicts on employee performance by using a package STATA. Both descriptive and inferential analysis was performed and multiple regression used to test the hypotheses. Results of the study showed that there is a significant relationship between relationship conflict, outcomes of interpersonal conflict, and interpersonal conflict strategies and employee performance. While there is no significant relationship between task conflict and employee performance. The result from the partial correlation coefficients reveals that task conflict positively affected the employee performance while relationship conflict, interpersonal conflict strategies, and outcomes of interpersonal conflict negatively affected employee performance respectively. The benefit to the study will enhance a manager’s knowledge about the interpersonal conflict and how affects employee performance in order to gain the effectiveness of employee's performance.