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This paper aims to explain how contractual complexity, including contractual control, coordination and adaptation, makes a difference to the task and relationship conflict, and then, to investigate the moderating roles played by both, total interdependence and interdependence asymmetry, in altering the association between the two types of conflicts.

This study obtained data through a questionnaire survey in the Chinese construction industry and the final sample consisted of 232 responses. The data were analysed using hierarchy analysis using SPSS.

The results are as follows: first, higher contractual control and coordination reduce the level of relationship conflicts, and higher contractual coordination also reduces the level of task conflicts; second, task conflict positively affects relationship conflict; third, task conflict mediates the relationship between contractual coordination and relationship conflict; and finally, when total interdependence is higher, task conflict induces more relationship conflict. On the contrary, high interdependence asymmetry weakens the positive relationship between task and relationship conflicts.

This study highlights the importance of contracts in conflict management. The findings can guide practitioners in drafting suitable contracts to deal with task and relationship conflicts more effectively.

This study differentiates the effects of distinct components of contracts on task and relationship conflicts, and then reveals the contingent effects of interdependence on the relationship between task and relationship conflicts in inter-organisational transactions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how different forms of interpersonal conflicts and employees’ psychological empowerment may affect knowledge sharing intentions directly or indirectly via interpersonal trust in the workplace.

Survey data collected from 249 employees of 37 of the top 500 corporations in the manufacturing industry in Taiwan were used for the data analysis. The research model was analyzed using the component-based structural equation modeling technique, namely, the partial least squares (PLS) approach.

The results indicate that both relationship and task conflicts have significant indirect effects on employees’ knowledge sharing intentions via psychological empowerment and trust. Additionally, psychological empowerment significantly influences employees’ knowledge sharing intentions both directly and indirectly via trust.

The primary theoretical implication is an advancement in the understanding of the critical antecedents of and their different effects on employees’ knowledge sharing intentions from the perspectives of conflict management and individual psychological empowerment. Future research may concentrate on investigating the bidirectional interactions among trust, relationship conflicts and task conflicts in different knowledge-sharing contexts.

This study provides practical insights into conflict resolution intended to facilitate psychological empowerment and interpersonal trust that encourage knowledge sharing in the workplace.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first knowledge sharing study that empirically examines how task and relationship conflicts affect employees’ knowledge sharing intentions differently via the mediation of their perceived psychological empowerment and interpersonal trust in one another in the workplace.

Drawing on job demands-resources theory (Bakker and Demerouti, 2017) and conservation of resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989), this study aims to investigate the roles of work task conflict and coworker support in the experience of daily work-family balance. In particular, this study theorizes work-family balance as a higher-order construct, including both psychological (work-family balance satisfaction) and social (work-family balance effectiveness) dimensions.

The authors tested the proposed model using daily diary survey data collected from 50 full-time corporate employees across five consecutive workdays in a week. The hypotheses were tested using multilevel modeling analyses.

Analyses show that work task conflict impedes employees’ work-family balance on a daily basis. Results also support the moderating role of coworker support, such that the negative relationship between work task conflict and work-family balance is weaker when coworker support is high.

This research contributes to the literature by considering work-family balance as a higher-order construct. Further, this research advances theoretical knowledge of the interpersonal predictors of work-family balance. This study also expands previous work by examining the dynamic relationships between interpersonal events and work-family balance.

Over 83.72 million Chinese firms employing more than 775 million employees. It is essential to explore employee relationships and conflict management practices in China. Although collectivism can influence employee cognition and emotions, the psychological mechanism that links collectivism and job satisfaction is still unclear. Researchers have found existing empirical findings on conflict–performance relationships to be mixed and inconsistent, and have identified the need to pinpoint the explanatory mechanisms and boundary conditions that underlie the effect of conflict on job performance. This study aims to provide some clarification to this important yet relatively unclear issue.

A questionnaire survey was conducted in China to collect data. The authors received completed questionnaires from 466 employees.

Analysis of questionnaire results reveals that job satisfaction mediates the relationships between conflicts and perceived job performance, and that collectivism moderates the relationships between conflicts and job satisfaction. Specifically, the positive relationship between task conflict and job satisfaction is amplified by high levels of horizontal collectivism (HC) and vertical collectivism (VC), while the negative relationship between relationship conflict and job satisfaction is strengthened by HC.

The main limitation is that this study used a cross-sectional design, meaning that causality in relationships cannot be established from results. Despite this limitation, the present findings provide insights into conflict management, job satisfaction and culture value literature.

This paper examines the moderating role of employees’ collectivist orientation (not national culture) on the relationships between conflicts and employee job satisfaction at the individual level. It also explores HC and VC and identifies their differential effects on the relationships between conflicts and job satisfaction.

A strong relation between task and relationship conflict has toxic impact on teams and poses a high-risk factor in startup organizations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the moderating role of conflict behavior and related coping strategies on the relationship between task and relationship conflict in startup teams.

The authors conducted surveys among 100 Dutch and German startup members (Study 1) and 75 Belgium startup members (Study 2). In Study 3, 75 startup members completed weekly surveys in 11 consecutive weeks.

Both Study 1 and 2 show that the positive association between task and relationship conflict is buffered by problem-solving conflict behavior while this relationship is amplified by the use of avoiding strategies in startup teams. Similarly, the results of Study 3 show that individual and team-level problem-focused coping over a period of 11 weeks buffers the association between task and relationship conflict during this period, while individual disengagement coping potentiates it.

This study adds to the literature on conflict management and entrepreneurship by studying conflict behavior as a moderator in the association between task and relationship conflict in startup teams. Moreover, it takes a comprehensive perspective by including coping strategies conceptually related to conflict behaviors at both individual and teamlevel, as moderators in this relationship. The results of this study provide practical recommendations for entrepreneurs on how to prevent conflict escalation via conflict-oriented behaviors and more general coping strategies.

This paper aims to examine the effects of task and relationship conflicts on team creativity, and the moderating role of shared leadership in inter-organizational teams. An inter-organizational team normally comprises employees from collaborated organizations brought together to conduct an initiative, such as product development. Practitioners and researchers have witnessed the prevalence of conflict in inter-organizational teams. Despite significant scholarly investigation into the importance of conflict in creativity, a deep theoretical understanding of conflict framework remains elusive.

A questionnaire survey was conducted in China to collect data. Consequently, 54 teams, which comprised 54 team managers and 276 team members, were deemed useful for the study.

By testing our hypotheses on 54 inter-organizational teams, we found that relationship conflict has a negative relationship with team creativity, whereas task conflict has an inverted U-shaped (curvilinear) relationship with team creativity. Furthermore, when shared leadership is stronger, the negative relationship with team creativity is weaker for relationship conflict, whereas the inverted U-shaped relationship with team creativity is stronger for task conflict.

The main limitation is cross-sectional, which cannot establish causality in relationships. Despite this potential weakness, the present research provides insights into conflict, leadership and inter-organizational collaboration literature.

The findings of this study offer some guidance on how managers can intervene in the conflict situations of inter-organizational teams.

Managers are struggling to identify ways to effectively manage team conflict when a team of diverse individuals across organizational boundaries are brought together to solve a problem. The findings of this study offer some guidance on how managers can intervene in the conflict situations of inter-organizational teams.

This paper provides understandings about how relationship and task conflicts affect team creativity in inter-organizational teams.

The lack of a clear conceptualization and operationalization of the construct of interpersonal conflict makes it difficult to compare the results of different studies and hinders the accumulation of knowledge in the conflict domain. Defining interpersonal conflict as a dynamic process that occurs between interdependent parties as they experience negative emotional reactions to perceived disagreements and interference with the attainment of their goals, the present paper presents a two‐dimensional framework and a typology of interpersonal conflict that incorporates previous conceptualizations of the construct. The first dimension of the framework identifies three properties generally associated with conflict situations: disagreement, negative emotion, and interference. The framework's second dimension identifies two targets of interpersonal conflict encountered in organizational settings: task and interpersonal relationship. Based on this framework, the paper highlights several shortcomings of current conceptualizations and operationalizations of interpersonal conflict in the organizational literature, and provides suggestions for their remedy.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce and test a model of group processes (e.g. conflict), emergent states (e.g. trust), and group context (e.g. connectedness) to better understand the mechanisms that underlie the traditionally negative effects of conflict.

A total of 27 workgroups of a Dutch telecommunications company participated in a survey. To assess trust as a mediator between conflict and performance bootstrapping analysis was used. In addition, the moderating role of the three connectedness types was investigated with hierarchical regressions.

The results suggest that trust partially mediates the effect of task conflict and fully mediates the effect of relationship conflict on performance. Furthermore, trust is less affected by task conflict when group members are highly cognitively connected and less affected by relationship conflict when group members are highly task connected.

This research implies that task and cognitive connectedness decrease the negative effect of conflict on trust, and hence, performance. Shortcomings include discussing the causality between conflict and trust, and the possibility of different perceptions among group members regarding group phenomena.

The findings suggest that managers can help to provide circumstances in which conflict is not necessarily destructive for intragroup trust and performance.

Provides one of the first empirical examinations of the mediating role of trust in the relationship between task and relationship conflict and perceived group performance. Additionally, examines if connectedness (the level of active involvement of group members with each other) buffers the negative effects of conflict on trust.

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.

Although the negative consequences of conflict in work settings have long been recognized, it is only in recent years that researchers have examined its positive effects, and the majority of this research has been conducted at the group level. This paper aims to examine the positive effects of conflict on individual work behaviors by differentiating between task and relationship conflicts, as well as the moderating influence of two contextual variables.

A survey was conducted with 166 pairs of supervisors and subordinates in China.

Results supported the hypotheses that task conflict is positively related to both innovative behaviors and knowledge sharing behaviors while relationship conflict is negatively related to both individual‐directed organizational citizenship and knowledge sharing behaviors. Support for innovation and reward system for relationship‐building functioned as contextual factors to moderate the relationships between task and relationship conflicts and the workplace behaviors studied.

The hypotheses proposed and most of the findings are original.