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The aim of this study is to understand the levels (i.e. mild vs intense) of task conflict (TC) expressions between angel investors and entrepreneurs at the post-investment stage and how it affect angel investors’ follow-on investment intentions with the same entrepreneur.

Survey data was gathered from 71 angel investors in China. Mplus was used to test the proposed research model.

This study found that angels perceive affective conflict (AC) when engaged in intense TC, unlike the case for mild TC expressions. Furthermore, the analysis shows that, unlike mild TC expressions, intense TC expressions impede angels’ reinvestment intentions when they perceive ACs. Other results indicate that when angels perceive that entrepreneurs are not open to coaching, the prominence of mild TC expression is sharply mitigated and becomes as detrimental as intense TC expressions.

This study only focused on one specific aspect of the angel–entrepreneur post-investment relationship: The effect of their TC expressions on angels’ reinvestment intentions. By no means do the authors imply that TC expression in the angel–entrepreneur post-investment relationship is the only factor that matters to angel investors in their follow-on investment intentions with the same entrepreneur.

The findings suggest that entrepreneurs should pay careful attention to TC that may arise between them and their financiers. TCs are not entirely detrimental, but their negative effect might depend on how they are expressed. An appropriate level of TC may also improve enterprise performance and collaboration. Thus, angels and entrepreneurs should set clear goals and performance standards, where task interactions mainly focus on the goals and expected outcomes.

Prior to this study, little was known about whether all TCs potentially lead to ACs. By distinguishing between levels (i.e. mild vs intense) of TC expressions between angels and entrepreneurs, this study adds a novel aspect to it by showing that TC, in and of itself, does not necessarily lead to AC but can lead to AC once its intensity grows.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between three conflict types, cognitive task conflict, emotional relationship conflict and emotional task conflict, and team effectiveness (team performance and team job satisfaction).

The authors conducted a group-level ordinary least square regression analysis of 61 working teams to investigate the study variables, and possible interaction effects among them. In an auxiliary analysis (36 teams), they analyzed the role of mood dimensions (hedonic valence and general conflict activation) as mediators to the relationship between cognitive task conflict and team effectiveness.

Cognitive task conflict was negatively related to team performance, emotional relationship conflict was negatively related to team job satisfaction and emotional task conflict was positively related to team performance, all controlled for the effect of each other. The relationship between cognitive task conflict and team job satisfaction was negatively moderated by team size. Mood valence mediated the relationship between cognitive task conflict and team performance, and between cognitive task conflict and team job satisfaction.

Several possible research lines emanate from the current field study. First of all, the authors suggest that emotional task conflict may be of particular interest, as this is hypothesized and found to be incrementally positively related to team performance. Second, their auxiliary study of the mediating effect of mood valence on the relationship between cognitive task conflict and performance may spur curiosity concerning the role of mood as a mediator of the relationship between task or cognitive conflicts and team effectiveness.

The practitioner should be advised to try to facilitate the distribution of intragroup conflict in their teams in the direction of an increased level of emotional task conflict (positive for performance) at the expense of cognitive task conflict (negative for performance) and emotional relationship conflict (negative for satisfaction). The practitioner should allow intragroup conflicts to be highly activated (intense), as long as the interactions are strictly directed to the task in hand, and not being personal. In addition, a positive mood in teams may significantly strengthen the team's resilience against adverse consequences of conflicts.

The three conflict types in this three-dimensional intragroup conflict model (3IC) have never been tested before, and the findings open for a conflict type – emotional task conflict – that may generally be conducive for the teams’ performance, evaluated by the teams’ supervisors. This is a conflict type where people simultaneously are emotional and yet task oriented. To the authors’ knowledge, this is a novelty, and they hope that it may encourage further research on this conflict type.

Scholars have articulated the importance of family capital for successful family business outcomes. In the review of literature, empirical evidence supporting this assertion has been lacking. The purpose of this paper is to offer an empirical study of the relationship between family capital and family business success as well as the moderating effects of conflict to this relationship.

Hierarchical regression was used in this study. Using a sample of 299 firms the author investigates the relationship between family capital and family business performance as well as the moderating role of conflict on this relationship.

Results support the notion that family capital is a significant predictor of family business performance. Furthermore, the author finds that task conflict moderates the relationship between family capital and family business performance, while relational conflict has no impact on performance.

The revelation that family capital can lead to a sustained competitive advantage makes the decision to support and nurture it much easier. Also, family capital appears to compensate for ineffective levels of task conflict. Finally, family capital shows much promise in being that rare, valuable, inimitable, and unsubstitutable resource that leads to sustained competitive advantage.

This research begins the empirical validation process for the theoretical construct family capital as well as exploring the moderating relationship of conflict.

This book is a policy proposal aimed at the democratic left. It is concerned with gradual but radical reform of the socio‐economic system. An integrated policy of industrial and economic democracy, which centres around the establishment of a new sector of employee‐controlled enterprises, is presented. The proposal would retain the mix‐ed economy, but transform it into a much better “mixture”, with increased employee‐power in all sectors. While there is much of enduring value in our liberal western way of life, gross inequalities of wealth and power persist in our society.

Married female professionals with children (n=50) were interviewed to examine their experience of work‐family conflict and the human resources policies they would like to see implemented at their workplace to assist them to balance their home and job demands. The results revealed that the traditional nature of the Hong Kong family, compounded by long working hours, had led to an exhausting lifestyle for almost all the female married professionals. When asked about the HR practices that might be appropriate to help alleviate work‐family conflict, the overwhelming preference was “flexible hours” (n=30). Given these findings, it is suggested that changes in work patterns towards a flexible schedule would be beneficial for both employers and employees.

The current study focused on intra‐group conflict by attempting to elucidate individual and situational factors underlying choices along two dimensions of conflict management patterns: engagement versus avoidance and constructive versus destructive. In the study, the role of two types of self‐efficacy (global and social) among group members was investigated, as was the sense of group identification in team dispute resolution preferences modes. Sixty‐seven members of volunteer community service communes in the Israeli Scouting youth movement, 48 females and 19 males, representing 13 intact teams, participated in the study. Self‐report structured questionnaires (previously used and adapted for this study) served as research instruments. Both global self‐efficacy and group identification independently predicted the conflict engagement‐destructive pattern of domination. Social self‐efficacy served as the sole predictor of the preference to manage intra‐team conflict by means of integrating—the engagement‐constructive mode. In contrast, the choice of compromising was also fostered by the joint contribution of social self‐efficacy and group‐identification, beyond the direct effect of social self‐efficacy. The study corroborates the assumption that conflict management patterns within an intact team are related to dispositional variables on the individual level, i.e., global and social self‐efficacy, and to the team‐related variable of group identification.

A collection of essays by a social economist seeking to balance economics as a science of means with the values deemed necessary to man′s finding the good life and society enduring as a civilized instrumentality. Looks for authority to great men of the past and to today′s moral philosopher: man is an ethical animal. The 13 essays are: 1. Evolutionary Economics: The End of It All? which challenges the view that Darwinism destroyed belief in a universe of purpose and design; 2. Schmoller′s Political Economy: Its Psychic, Moral and Legal Foundations, which centres on the belief that time‐honoured ethical values prevail in an economy formed by ties of common sentiment, ideas, customs and laws; 3. Adam Smith by Gustav von Schmoller – Schmoller rejects Smith′s natural law and sees him as simply spreading the message of Calvinism; 4. Pierre‐Joseph Proudhon, Socialist – Karl Marx, Communist: A Comparison; 5. Marxism and the Instauration of Man, which raises the question for Marx: is the flowering of the new man in Communist society the ultimate end to the dialectical movement of history?; 6. Ethical Progress and Economic Growth in Western Civilization; 7. Ethical Principles in American Society: An Appraisal; 8. The Ugent Need for a Consensus on Moral Values, which focuses on the real dangers inherent in there being no consensus on moral values; 9. Human Resources and the Good Society – man is not to be treated as an economic resource; man′s moral and material wellbeing is the goal; 10. The Social Economist on the Modern Dilemma: Ethical Dwarfs and Nuclear Giants, which argues that it is imperative to distinguish good from evil and to act accordingly: existentialism, situation ethics and evolutionary ethics savour of nihilism; 11. Ethical Principles: The Economist′s Quandary, which is the difficulty of balancing the claims of disinterested science and of the urge to better the human condition; 12. The Role of Government in the Advancement of Cultural Values, which discusses censorship and the funding of art against the background of the US Helms Amendment; 13. Man at the Crossroads draws earlier themes together; the author makes the case for rejecting determinism and the “operant conditioning” of the Skinner school in favour of the moral progress of autonomous man through adherence to traditional ethical values.

Most anger research has adopted a within-person view, focusing on the effects of experienced anger on a person's feelings, cognition, and behavior. Less research has examined the effects of anger expressed by one person on other people in the workplace. We review available literature on the interpersonal effects of anger and propose a theoretical framework that addresses two main questions (1) What mechanisms can explain the effects of observed anger on other people? and (2) What factors may strengthen or attenuate these effects? We propose that observed anger affects observers’ performance via emotional and cognitive routes that are interrelated, and that this effect depends on the properties of the expressed anger, the situation in which the anger occurs, and the task being performed by the observer.

The fragmentation can either lead to an all-out civil war as in Sri Lanka or a frozen conflict as in Georgia. One of the main characteristics of fragmentation is the control of group members by their respective leaders. The chapter applies standard models of non-cooperative game theory to explain the endogenous fragmentation, which seeks to model the equilibrium formation of rival groups. Citizens become members of these rival groups and some sort of clientelism develops in which political leaders control their respective fragments of citizens. Once the divisions are created, the inter-group rivalry can trigger violent conflicts that may seriously damage the social fabric of a nation and threaten the prospect of peace for the people for a very long time. In other words, our main goal in this chapter is to understand the formation of the patron–client relationship or what is called clientelisation.

The purpose of this paper is to model the nature of intra-group conflicts and to show how conflict process phases that are beneficial to the organization can be supported and how disadvantageous conflict process phases can be prevented or managed. Task (process) and relationship conflicts can appear alternately in the same conflict process, so the overperformance cannot be estimated by the number of intra-group conflicts alone. By exploring the intra-group conflict processes, the author can identify patterns of employee commitment that can increase, mitigate or prevent certain phases of conflict processes.

The study presents three intra-group conflicts from the same multinational company using the narrative tool. Qualitative methods are particularly suitable for modeling feelings, thoughts, fears and workplace attitudes. The cases come from the immediate managers of the conflict-affected groups.

The process of intra-group conflicts can typically be divided into four phases: task (process) conflict; relationship conflict; task (process) conflict; end of conflict (end of teeming). Task conflict, which provides overperformance for the organization, is supported by the employees’ normative and professional commitment, while the prevention of relationship conflict, which is detrimental to performance, is supported by increasing the employees’ affective commitment. The relationship between affective commitment and relationship conflict is moderated by transformational leadership. Finally, the minimum of team performance is affected by both the degree of relationship conflict and the lack of affective commitment, while the maximum of team performance is positively affected by the degree of task (process) conflict and the employees’ normative and professional commitment.

In the future, the results should be confirmed by researches using quantitative methods.

The results suggest to managers that enhancing employees’ affective commitment is primarily important for preventing the disadvantageous relationship conflicts, while enhancing their normative and professional commitment is important for fostering the performance-related task conflict. The results show that increasing commitment goes beyond the organizational value of employees’ loyalty alone, and also highlight the importance of training and development.

In the literature on intra-group conflicts, most studies treat task and relationship conflicts independently of each other in conflict processes. This paper shows that both conflicts can be part of the same process at the same time. In addition, little research had addressed how employee commitment reduces or increases the certain phase of a specific type of conflict process.