Vol. 5, Issue 1, Part A (2023)

It is a great calamity for the church to struggle to have peace as a result of conflict caused by more selfish interest, and inordinate ambition of few individual who felt things should change by violent means. Conflict management is the utilization of human and other resources to achieve conflict resolution in the church. Many studies had focused much on societal conflict both in Nigeria and overseas but neglected church conflict, therefore, this study investigated personality types and conflict management of pastors in Cherubim and Seraphim Church of Zion in Akure. Descriptive survey research designwas adopted for the study. Simple random sampling techniques was used to select 150 pastors (Male: 85 and Female 65). 60-item NEO Personality Inventory, NEO-FFI (Costa & McCrae, 1992) was used to measure the Five-Factor Model of personality and Conflict Handling Behaviour Scale was used to measure conflict management of the pastors. The results showed that significant relationship among: openness to experience (r=.480, p<.05), conscientiousness (r=.612, p<.05), extraversion (r=.703, p<.05), agreeableness (r=.597, p<.05), and neuroticism (r=.256, p<.05) to conflict management. The independent variables jointly contributed to conflict management (Ajusted R=.603, F5, 139=44.8) and accounted for 61.7% contribution. Openness to experience (β =.212, p<.05), Conscientiousness (β =.110, p<.05), Extraversion (β=.379, p<.05), Agreeableness (β=.180, p<.05), Neuroticism (β=.292, p<.05) contributed to conflict management. it is recommended that personality and conflict management training should be included in the devotional manual, Sunday school manual and pastoral training institutes’ materials of the church of Zion to allow all pastors to acquire and apply the knowledge of personality factors and conflict management skills.