A cross-sector analysis of employees’ perceptions of workplace conflicts in Bulgarian organizations

Background: Workplace conflicts may have both constructive and destructive consequences for employees and organizations, making their management important for employee well-being and organizational effectiveness. Although workplace conflicts have been examined in specific sectors in Bulgaria, evidence remains limited regarding whether employees’ perceptions and the relationships among different aspects of workplace conflict vary across economic sectors. Objectives: The study aims to examine employees’ perceptions of conflict incidence, conflict resolution, satisfaction with conflict resolution, and self-efficacy across major economic sectors in Bulgaria and to determine whether the levels and relationships among these variables are similar across sectors. Methods/Approach: The study is based on an online survey of 1,016 full-time employees from organizations operating across six economic sectors in Bulgaria: manufacturing, commerce, services, finance, the public sector, and the non-profit sector. Descriptive statistics, sector-specific Wilcoxon signed-rank tests, Kruskal–Wallis tests, Spearman’s rank correlations, and pairwise permutation tests of sector-specific correlations were applied. Holm adjustment was used to account for multiple comparisons. Results: A similar tendency was observed across the six sectors. Conflict incidence was significantly below the scale midpoint, whereas conflict resolution, satisfaction, and self-efficacy were significantly above it in every sector. Kruskal–Wallis tests revealed no statistically significant sectoral differences in any of the four variables, with very small effect sizes. Conflict incidence was negatively associated with the other variables across most sectors, while strong positive correlations among conflict resolution, satisfaction, and self-efficacy were observed across all sectors. Pairwise permutation tests showed that the strength of these relationships was largely stable across sectors. After Holm adjustment, only the association between conflict incidence and self-efficacy differed significantly between the public sector and commerce. Conclusions: Employees’ perceptions of workplace conflicts are broadly similar across economic sectors in Bulgaria, both in their overall levels and in the relationships among the examined variables. Cross-sector similarities are considerably more prominent than differences, suggesting that the identified patterns of workplace conflict and its resolution extend across diverse organizational contexts. The findings may support the development of conflict management practices applicable across different sectors while also highlighting the need to consider specific organizational contexts.