Teacher Leadership and Conflict Management in EFL Classroom in the Light of the Contingency Theory of Human Resource Management: An Interdisciplinary Study Elham Yazdanmehr  Attar Institute of Higher Education, Mashhad, Iran Yousef Ramezani Attar Institute of Higher Education, Mashhad, Iran Fatemeh Aghdassi Imam Reza University, Mashhad, Khorasan Razavi, Iran Abstract—The present interdisciplinary research was enlightened by the contingency theory of human resource management (HRM) and aimed to explore Iranian EFL teachers’ leadership and conflict management styles in the private sector. To this aim, Fiedler’s leadership measurement instrument along with Thomas & Kilmann’s conflict management instrument were used to collect data from 51 EFL teachers teaching in private language institutes of Khorasan Razavi, Iran. The aim was to find what proportion of teachers were task-oriented and what proportion were relation-oriented in leadership, and which conflict management styles were more prevalent among task-oriented and which were dominant among relation- oriented teachers. Furthermore, comparisons were made between male/female, younger (20-30 yrs.)/older (>30 yrs.) and experienced (>5 yrs.)/novice (<5 yrs.) teachers in terms of the leadership style as well as the conflict management style. Descriptive as well as inferential statistics were used to analyze the data in SPSS21. The results revealed that the majority of participants used task-oriented leadership style in class. Task-oriented teachers showed to use the accommodating conflict management style more while relation-oriented teachers prevalently used the collaborating style. Statistically significant differences were found between demographic groups in terms of the leadership and conflict management styles. Awareness of different leadership and conflict management styles can enrich teacher training courses and professional development programs in Applied Linguistics. Index Terms—conflict management style, contingency theory, EFL teacher, leadership style I. INTRODUCTION Leadership was first studied in a variety of contexts including the military, and the contingency theory in management to which leadership concept belongs was primarily based on research findings in such domains but it is currently applied in other domains including education (Virkus, 2009). According to the contingency theory, a leader's style works best when it fits with the group environment but is still adequately flexible to adapt to a wide range of changing circumstances. This model initially provided much of the groundwork for further research on situational management theory (Northouse, 2007). Fiedler, the pioneer of the contingency theory, measured leadership style with the Least Preferred Co-Worker Scale (LPC scale.) The leaders scoring high on this scale were perceived as relationship motivated and those scoring low were considered task motivated. Central to the contingency theory is the concept of situation-specificity. A high score on the leadership style instrument exhibits a positive orientation towards human relations. It shows that the respondent gets along with people. The nature of the task is less important and issues in doing it may be compensated for with good human relations. When the environment is such that each group member is independent, such as in a scientific setting, tasks may not be all that well defined, and a leader must rely more on his/her personality to accomplish goals (Fiedler, 1958). Central to the contingency theory is the concept of situation-specificity (Fiedler, 1958). The situation-specific nature of EFL/ESL teaching is also significant (Huang, Yang & Hwang, 2010). Yet, contingency theory has not yet been applied to the English Language Teaching (ELT) domain, to which teacher leadership and class management is a core  Corresponding author ISSN 1799-2591 Theory and Practice in Language Studies, Vol. 10, No. 8, pp. 916-927, August 2020 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1008.09 © 2020 ACADEMY PUBLICATION