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The five studies included in this special issue focus on emotions and conflict management. These studies highlight how conflict management research can help managers, employees, and organizations more effectively manage the emotional aspects of conflict. This paper aims to summarize these studies.

Five studies were selected and combined in this single issue so that researchers could have an integrative review of recent research on emotions in the workplace. The studies were chosen to highlight the relationships between emotions and key conflict variables, such as task, relationship, and process conflict; trust; venting; and forgiveness. The studies were also chosen to represent a broad range of samples, including participants from more than 14 countries and cultures.

These studies indicate that a broad range of positive and negative emotions, such as anger, enthusiasm, excitement, guilt, and remorse, are significantly related in complex and varied ways to various aspects of conflict management. The studies highlight not only the importance of understanding specific emotions in conflict situations, but also the need to understand how and when the regulation of emotions can facilitate effective conflict management.

These cutting‐edge studies demonstrate how emotions are a needed and important addition to the field of conflict management research – above and beyond cognitions and behaviors. Such findings highlight the need for additional research on emotions in conflict situations. Although these studies represent many different countries, more research is needed that specifically compares and contrasts the influence of emotions on conflict management across various cultures.

This special issue is the first publication to focus on the influence of conflict management in many different countries and cultures.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the triple interaction of task conflict, emotion regulation and group temporariness on the emergence of relationship conflict.

A field study was conducted to test the interaction of emotion regulation and task conflict on the emergence of relationship conflict in 43 short‐term (temporary) groups and 44 long‐term groups.

The results show that the highest chance for task conflict to evolve into relationship conflict is when groups (both short‐term and long‐term) have less effective emotion regulation processes, while task and relationship conflict are rather decoupled in long‐term groups scoring high on emotion regulation.

The paper concludes with a discussion of the obtained results in terms of their implications for conflict management in groups. Further research should explore the moderation effects in longitudinal studies in order to fully test the variables in the model.

The paper answers the call for contingency models of intra‐group conflict and tests the moderating effect of two such contingencies in the relationship between task and relationship conflict.

This paper aims to critique the rationalist theoretical framework of international mediation, which ignores emotions in analyzing the decision by conflict parties to pursue a negotiated settlement or continue fighting, and to present an alternative framework that integrates emotions.

The paper draws on psychology research on emotions and conflict to develop an emotionally informed framework for analyzing conflict parties’ decision-making regarding a settlement. It demonstrates the framework’s validity and value through a case study of the 2000 Camp David mediation to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

A rationalist approach to mediation does not have adequate explanatory and predictive power theoretically. In practice, it can reduce the prospect of success.

The paper highlights the necessity for mediation researchers to study the effects of emotion, draw on psychology studies on conflict and explore the emotional implications of different mediation strategies and tactics.

The framework highlights the challenge of designing and conducting mediation in a way that cultivates emotions favorable to a settlement and lessens emotions unfavorable to a settlement.

This is the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to critique the rationalist framework of international mediation studies and develop an alternative framework that integrates emotions.

This study aims to examine how and when task and process conflicts relate to relationship conflict by detailing the mediating role of negative emotions and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence.

Survey data were collected from 462 employees working in different organizations in Pakistan.

The results revealed that individuals engaged in task and process conflicts are more likely to feel negative emotions toward others and consequently are more likely to engage in relationship conflict in the workplace. This mediated relationship of task and process conflicts with relationship conflict via negative emotions is lower when employees are more emotionally intelligent.

This study pinpointed a key mechanism, negative emotions, by which task and process conflicts lead to relationship conflict. Emotionally intelligent individuals are better at regulating their negative emotions; therefore, emotional intelligence training can be an effective tool for minimizing employees’ negative emotions during task and process conflicts, which can help reduce relationship conflict.

By examining the mediating role of negative emotions and the moderating effect of emotional intelligence, this study adds to the previous research by detailing how and when task and process conflicts lead to relationship conflict.

The purpose of this study is to find ways to mitigate the negative consequences of relationship conflict under the situation that while the negative role of team relationship conflict has been underscored in prior literature, few studies try to alleviate it. With the development of positive psychology, a stream focusing on the role of emotion in conflict management emerges. First, the authors want to explore the mediating role of members’ work engagement in the association between relationship conflict and members’ job performance. Moreover, they want to explore contingent roles of perceived team leader’s emotional intelligence and members’ emotion regulation strategies (i.e. cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression) in moderating the effect of relationship conflict on members’ work engagement.

Using a data set of 363 individuals working in 73 teams in service sectors, the authors empirically examined the cross-level model with hierarchical linear model.

Relationship conflict was negatively related to members’ job performance while members’ work engagement mediated this relationship. Moreover, perceived team leader’s emotional intelligence mitigated the negative effect of relationship conflict on members’ work engagement, while members’ expressive suppression strategy intensified the negative effect.

The authors address the void of the cross-level mediating process by examining the role of individual work engagement that mediates relationship conflict and individual job performance. The individual work engagement is highlighted in this study for the hope of serving as the basis of finding effective moderators to alleviate the negative relationship conflict–performance relationship by mitigating the decrease of work engagement. Moreover, the claim that the role of emotion from different status subjects varies in regulating the effect of relationship conflict contributes to the development of positive psychology by combining emotion with conflict management.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between interpersonal conflict and construction project performance. The authors test the proposition that this relationship is mediated by negative emotions and moderated by political skill.

This study used a structured questionnaire survey and gathered 266 completed data from 45 construction project teams in mainland China. To test the hypotheses, bootstrapping procedures were used.

The results show that interpersonal conflict and negative emotions all have inverse relationships with project performance. Additionally, negative emotions mediated the relationship between interpersonal conflict and project performance, and this indirect relationship will be mitigated when team members have a high level of political skill.

These findings indicate that interpersonal conflict has a detrimental influence on project performance and should attract broad attention for future empirical literature. Furthermore, political skill is an effective contingent factor to suppress the detrimental influence of interpersonal conflict.

The findings imply that managers should highlight the importance of interpersonal conflict in construction projects.

This paper addresses a moderated mediation model to examine the relationship among interpersonal conflict, negative emotions and construction project performance, and it takes into account the moderating role of political skill. The paper also offers practical assistance to construction project managers in managing interpersonal conflict.

The current study aims to identify the factors underlying differing preferences for conflict‐management patterns within work teams. Two major antecedents of dispute resolution modes were examined: the team members' emotional reactions to and their perceptions of the type of conflicts encountered in their work group. The sample consisted of 69 medical teams, comprising 331 employees (nurses and physicians) employed in several medical organizations. Self‐report structured questionnaires were used to assess the research variables. A series of regression analyses showed that cooperative (integrating and compromising) patterns of conflict management were associated with positive intragroup emotional states; contentious (dominating) patterns were associated with positive as well as negative emotions; and an avoidance pattern was associated with negative emotions only. Additionally, negative emotions were found to mediate the association of relationship conflict with a dominating pattern of conflict management. The findings point to the centrality of emotional states in determining conflict management preferences at the intragroup level.

A growing body of research suggests that conflict can be beneficial for groups and organizations (e.g., De Dren & Van De Vliert, 1997). This paper articulates the argument that to be in conflict is to be emotionally activated (Jones, 2000) and utilizes Galtung's (1996) triadic theory of conflict transformation to locate entry points for conflict generation. Application of these ideas is presented through exemplars that demonstrate the utility of addressing emotions directly in the management of organizational conflicts.

The aim of this paper is to test the moderating role of emotion regulation in the transformation of both task and process conflict into relationship conflict.

A field study of multi-teams systems, in which (94) respondents are engaged in interpersonal and inter-team interactions, was conducted to test the effects of the interaction of emotion regulation and task and process conflict on the emergence of relationship conflict in 23 multi-team client/supplier systems.

The findings show that when collective emotion regulation strategies are effective, process conflict is less likely to transform into relationship conflict. An emerging finding of this study shows that process conflict mediates the interaction between task conflict and emotion regulation on relationship conflict in multi-team systems.

This study uses a relatively small number of projects and participants: further studies with larger samples are recommended; in addition, longitudinal studies would allow for further testing the effect of team longevity in the emergence of effective emotion regulation strategies.ct transforming into relationship conflicts.

The findings imply that managers of multi-team systems should actively try to stimulate their teams to develop effective emotion regulation strategies as effective emotion regulation mechanisms minimize the risk of process conflict transforming into relationship conflicts.

The paper looks at a real-world (as opposed to lab-situation) environment; it addresses a contingency model of intra-group conflict and tests the transformation of task and process conflicts into relationship conflict taking into account the moderating effect of emotion regulation.

This paper attempts to connect the literature on conflict and that of emotions. The argument presented is that emotions have until recently been understudied in conflict literature and vice versa. On the basis of the review of literature on both conflict and emotions, the paper points to new areas of exploration for researchers in both domains.

A literature review of two separate sub‐fields of study, namely conflict and emotions is provided with the intent of pointing towards gaps in connecting the two streams of research and towards a more holistic understanding of the role of emotions in conflict.

It is observed that the link between emotions and conflict has received little attention both in the literature on conflict and that of emotions. Insights into the role of emotions at the time of conflict and towards its subsequent resolution are provided. Future directions for study and potential linkages between the two streams are offered.

Connects two different streams of research and offers potential areas of exploration.