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Taking a cognitive perspective of internal auditor independence, the purpose of this study is to develop measures for the concepts of commitment to independence, role conflict and role ambiguity in the context of the internal auditor's work environment, in order to provide evidence of the effects of role conflict and ambiguity, and their sub‐dimensions, on the internal auditor's commitment to independence.

To measure these concepts, scales are developed for a questionnaire by drawing on measures established in the organizational behavior literature and adapting these to the internal auditor's context. The questionnaire is sent to a sample of internal auditors drawn from the database of the Institute of Internal Auditors Malaysia in which listed companies with an in‐house internal audit function are extracted. There are 101 useable responses.

The results reveal that both role ambiguity and role conflict are significantly negatively related to commitment to independence. The underlying dimensions found to have the greatest impact on commitment to independence are: first, ambiguity in both the exercise of authority by the internal auditor and time pressure faced by the internal auditor; and second, conflict between the internal auditor's personal values and both management's and their profession's expectations and requirements.

The results extend the literature on internal auditor independence and provide insights for auditing standards setters and corporate governance designers.

Scholars and practitioners alike wish to understand what makes workplace conflict beneficial or injurious to, for example, performance and satisfaction. The authors focus on parties’ personal experience of the conflict, which is complementary to studying conflict issues (i.e. task- or relationship-related conflict). Although many authors discuss the personal experience of conflict, which the authors will refer to as conflict personalization, different definitions are used, leading to conceptual vagueness. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to develop an integrative definition of the concept of conflict personalization.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review to collect definitions and conceptualizations from 41 publications. The subsequent thematic analysis revealed four building blocks that were used to develop an integrative definition of conflict personalization.

The authors developed the following definition: Conflict personalization is the negative affective as well as cognitive reaction to the self being threatened and/or in danger as a result of a social interaction about perceived incompatibilities.

The integrative definition of this study enables the development of a measurement instrument to assess personalization during workplace conflict, paving the way for developing effective research-based interventions.

Conceptual vagueness hampers theoretical development, empirical research and the development of effective interventions. Although the importance of conflict personalization is mentioned within the field of workplace conflict, it has not been empirically studied yet. This paper can serve as the basis for future research in which conflict issue and personal experience are separated.

The purpose of the study was to develop and test a model explaining visual artists’ levels of commitment to their primary distributors (dealers, agents, gallery owners).

A questionnaire was completed by 220 British artists covering their relationships with the main external intermediaries they used most frequently. The questionnaire covered the elements of a structural equation model designed to predict commitment levels. The model included as mediating variables the strength of an artist's personal brand and the individual's control over, dependence on, and conflict with a distributor.

Most of the respondents had good relationships with their distributors. The hypothesised model provided a sound fit with the data, although there was no significant connection between an artist's ability to control a distributor and the person's commitment to the distributor.

The research was undertaken in a single country and only visual artists (rather than, for instance, performing artists) were considered. Space restrictions prevented the detailed examination within the questionnaire of the participants’ relationships with different types of intermediary.

Artists should cultivate powerful personal brands and apply ‘relationalist’ approaches when dealing with distributors.

The study was the first to apply marketing theories of distribution to the arts domain. A new and original measure of the extent of a visual artist's personal branding activities was devised and employed as a part of the investigation.

Hospitals are complex and complicated organizations and are prone to the conflict. The purpose of this paper is to identify the intensity and type of conflict experienced by hospital managers and explore their conflict management strategies in hospitals affiliated with Tehran University of Medical Sciences.

This quantitative, descriptive and cross-sectional study was conducted in 2015. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from top, middle and front line managers. In total, 563 managers from 14 hospitals responded to the questionnaires. Data were analyzed using SPSS software version 19.

Hospital managers reported average level of conflict (2.73 score out of 5). Organizational factors produced more conflict for managers than personal factors. High workload, resource shortage, bureaucracy and differences in managers’ personality, knowledge, capabilities and skills were the main causes of organizational and personal conflict. Top managers experienced more conflict than middle and front line managers. Conflict was higher in specialized hospitals compared to general hospitals. Less conflict was observed in administrative and support departments than diagnostic and therapeutic departments. Conflict was meaningfully associated with management level, education, size of hospital, number of employees and willingness to leave the hospital. The dominant conflict management style of managers was collaborating. There were significant relationships between collaborating style and management level, manager’s age, work experience and management experience.

The nature of hospitals requires that managers use collaborating, compromising and accommodating styles to interact better with different stakeholders. Managers by acquiring necessary training and using the right conflict resolution strategies should keep the conflict in a constructive level in hospitals.

This is the first study conducted in Iran examining the level of conflict, its types and identifying managers’ dominant conflict resolution strategies at front line, middle and top management levels.

Organizations seek to achieve the best results for their strategic decisions by increasing the effectiveness of the vertical and horizontal interconnection. This leads to an efficient and effective flow of information when making decisions (from the bottom-up) and information related to those decisions when starting to implement them on the ground (from Top-down). Thus, the article aims that, it requires managers at all levels to practice relational leadership skills, the most important of which is dealing with emotions (through emotional intelligence (EI)) and conflicts (through personal styles).

In this paper the views of 324 managers were surveyed in several small and medium-sized companies in Saudi Arabia. The respondents were selected randomly.

A direct positive effect of EI, patterns of cooperation and comprehension to deal with conflict was found on the results of strategic decisions and indirectly through relational leadership.

This paper is restricted to the relevant literature on the influence of EI and personal styles of dealing with conflict on strategic decisions.

As part of the practical implication and managerial decision, policymakers should note that intelligence directly impacts strategic decisions.

This is one of the few studies that focused on the level of EI when choosing managers for organizational units and divisions.

Purpose – This study draws on conflict management literature to examine service recovery by service organizations and its effect on the important marketing outcomes of customer perceptions of service quality (satisfaction, trust, attribution/praise, and value) which influences customer retention rate (loyalty) and thus firm profitability.Design/methodology – Data from 412 banking customers are first employed to test the study’s model, and the results are subsequently cross-validated using a sample of 421 health-care customers.Findings – In services marked by moderate to low customer contact (i.e., task oriented) such as banking, effective conflict management tends to increase customer satisfaction, trust, and perceived customer value. It also has a positive effect on customer loyalty, albeit mediated by the above three variables. However, in high contact service contexts (i.e., personal oriented) like health care, conflict management seems to have relatively weak direct and indirect effects on customer loyalty.Research limitations/implications – The single country (Malaysian) origin of the present study’s data suggests the need for corresponding research in a Western context, where customers likely have different service expectations. Additionally, the research scope could be extended to focus on the relational nature of conflict management (the way in which a conflict is framed and resolved) in service recovery and how this moderates the relationship between perceived service quality and customer loyalty. The bi-industry approach taken in this research could also be extended to other low- and high-contact service sectors.Practical implications – Service organizations may benefit from training their employees on conflict management, honing skills in sensing and halting potential customer conflicts, and instituting a rapid and procedurally robust conflict resolution mechanism.Value/originality – This research is the first to examine firm’s conflict management across two service sectors. It contributes to theory by situating conflict management at the crux of the service failure/recovery relationship quality debate and underlining its relevance for a range of desired outcomes namely, customer satisfaction, customer trust, customer value attribution or customer praise, and customer loyalty.

Conflict styles are typically seen as a response to particular situations. By contrast, we argue that individual conflict styles may shape an employee's social environment, affecting the level of ongoing conflict and thus his or her experience of stress. Using data from a hospital‐affiliated clinical department, we find that those who use a more integrative style experience lower levels of task conflict, reducing relationship conflict, which reduces stress. Those who use a more dominating or avoiding style experience higher levels of task conflict, increasing relationship conflict and stress. We conclude that an employee's work environment is, in part, of his or her own making.

Managers spend a great deal of time in meetings making decisions critical to organisational success, yet the design aspects of meetings remain largely understudied. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the potential impact of one critical design aspect of meetings – namely, whether a decision to be taken (or the meeting in general) was scheduled or not – on the use of distributed information, information elaboration, conflict, speed of decision making, and, ultimately, decision-making effectiveness.

The research presented in this paper combines a literature review with empirical data obtained from questionnaires and direct observation of decision making meetings on organisational issues in a hospital. One meeting was scheduled, the other two were unscheduled. A second questionnaire was administered 12 months after the respective decision making meetings to explore and evaluate the efficiency of the decisions made and their implementation.

This paper suggests that a scheduled meeting with a shared agenda of all decisions to be taken may induce decision makers to form opinions upfront at the meeting, with these opinions eventually serving as sources of conflict during group discussion. Because of the nature of the conflict generated, these meetings are more likely to run long and to not deliver the expected outcomes.

The study contributes to the debate on group decision-making processes by examining the effect of meeting scheduling on information elaboration and conflict in real-world decision-making settings. Although robust evidence has supported the existence of relationships between information elaboration, conflict, and decision-making effectiveness, previous studies have mainly focused on the effects of these processes during scheduled meetings and experimental settings. The findings of the present study show the effect of meeting scheduling on decision-making effectiveness in real-world settings.