Eureka! Institutional Repository

School units are organizations in which people with different characteristics, beliefs and behaviors coexist and work. As a matter of course, because of their different nature, characteristics and experiences, these individuals cannot always agree on all issues concerning both the school unit and the very nature of their work, teaching, resulting in organizational conflicts. These organizational conflicts recorded within the school units can lead to both positive and negative outcomes. In any case, they need to be effectively managed in order to reduce the negative consequences and to take advantage of their benefits. In Greece, the issue of organizational conflict in school units has not been adequately explored, so the way managers / managers manage them in order to ensure the proper functioning of the units. In addition, leadership in the field of education plays an important role in tackling such phenomena as leadership style as one of the most up-to-date and current issues. The purpose of this work was to investigate the extent of organizational conflict within preschools, from the perspective of kindergarteners and supervisors, and to investigate whether conflict management is related to leadership style. For this reason, a quantitative survey was carried out on 144 preschool teachers and heads of the Thessaloniki Regional Unity. The results showed that the dominant leadership style of preschoolers is a mix of transformational and transactional leadership, and the dominant conflict management style of preschoolers is a mix of compromise and normalization. Finally, it was observed that transformational and transactional leadership was positively related to conflict management styles of normalization while negatively related to conflict management styles of enforcement and avoidance. This result can be justified 'by existing literature, as transformational leadership is characterized by the leader's tendency to listen to all employees' views by developing a spirit of teamwork and cooperation, which is not occurred with the imposition of 'as a conflict management tactic'.