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This study aims to deepen the understanding of the challenges and implications entailed by deploying mobile clinics in conflict zones to reach populations affected by violence and cut off from health-care services.

This research combines an integrated literature review and an instrumental case study. The literature review comprises two targeted reviews to provide insights: one on conflict zones and one on mobile clinics. The case study describes the process and challenges faced throughout a mobile clinic deployment during and after the Iraq War. The data was gathered using mixed methods over a two-year period (2017–2018).

Armed conflicts directly impact the populations’ health and access to health care. Mobile clinic deployments are often used and recommended to provide health-care access to vulnerable populations cut off from health-care services. However, there is a dearth of peer-reviewed literature documenting decision support tools for mobile clinic deployments.

This study highlights the gaps in the literature and provides direction for future research to support the development of valuable insights and decision support tools for practitioners.

With the large number of people each employee must work around and see daily, and the wide spectrum of backgrounds, it is almost a sure bet that conflicts will occasionally arise. There may be personality clashes, misunderstandings, miscommunications, disagreements, or just plain dislikes. Whatever the reason, every employee, sooner or later, must learn how to cope with, or handle, conflicts.

This paper aims to investigate the definition of conflict, and argue that conflict is not always destructive.

This commentary centers on re‐evaluating past research into the definition and nature of conflict. It proposes that more thought is required when using the term as it is too broad in its definition. The term has become synonymous with negativity, and this commentary aims to show that the term may also be used in certain situations when conflict can have a positive effect.

Although the research has shown that some people have a broader idea of what the term “conflict” comprises, the majority of people use the common definition related to destruction and negativity.

Opens up a discussion revolving around the concept of conflict and dispels the commonly held definition that conflict is always detrimental.

The paper takes an alternative view of conflict and opens up the little‐held discussion around the term itself and its negative connotations.

This paper aims to discuss the development of collaborative leadership skills to address an identified gap in senior management capability.

This paper is based on research carried out by IPSOS Mori consisting of interviews with 100 directors across the public and private sector.

The research found that 64 per cent of those questioned identified a gap in collaborative leadership skills and senior levels and this rose to 73 per cent of those who worked for companies with more than 5,000 employees. The paper highlights a key capability for a collaborative leader – the ability to handle conflict in a productive manner.

The paper analyses five areas of development for a collaborative leader with regard to conflict: understanding your own relationship to conflict; understanding the needs of groups; holding difficult conversations; finding the greater good; and mediating in other people's conflict. In each case it proposes practical steps to help leaders and development professionals handle these issues.

Investing in collaborative leadership capability is a priority for many businesses in these turbulent times. As economic pressures increase, the ability to work efficiently with critical business partners is a necessity. It is all too evident that ineffective collaboration and conflict in business relationships wastes time and money: these days this is something no one can afford. The skills outlined in this paper point the way for training managers to develop key people in their organisations to handle conflict and build effective relationships in tough times and in good.

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.

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.

To date, grievance research has made little use of behavioural concepts developed in the literature on organisational conflict. Such concepts form the basis for a model of grievance behaviour that relates the sources of grievances to grievance actions and outcomes. Sources of grievance conflict are explored by analysing interviews with Belgian and American employees concerning their complaints in the workplace. As an alternative to the limiting substantive classifications traditionally used, a categorisation of grievances is presented that corresponds to grievants′ own formulations of the causes of conflict. Applying this categorisation scheme to the interview data revealed that most grievances have multiple sources and that a grievant typically distorts public statements concerning the sources of the grievance. Behavioural analysis of grievances can benefit researcher and practitioner by providing insight into the organisational function of conflict and into employees′ most basic beliefs about their organisation′s values.

Four studies included in this Special Issue investigate the relationships of organizational justice (procedural, distributive, and interactional) to the five styles of handling conflict with supervisor (integrating, obliging, dominating, avoiding, and compromising); a structural equations model of the five styles of handling conflict, task and relationship conflicts, and felt stress; relationships of proportional conflict composition and perceptual conflict composition to group effectiveness; and resistance barriers to team effectiveness. These studies together make a contribution to the literature on conflict management.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a knowledge‐based decision support tool used for assisting en‐route air traffic controllers by generating resolutions for dual aircraft conflicts after being integrated into a model‐based conflict detection and conflict resolution system.

Air traffic controller knowledge, which was obtained from the literature research, about solving aircraft conflicts is represented in a decision tree. Then it is written in Visual Basic programming language. With reference to several rules form the expert air traffic controller knowledge and some factors which affect controller conflict resolution process, the tool generates advisories consisting of eight kinds of separation strategies.

The paper finds that it is expected to increase the safety of air traffic system by supporting air traffic controller in conflict resolution process. Controller workload can be reduced by fast, reliable and acceptable resolution advisories of the tool.

The accuracy of decision tree is limited with the adequacy and quality of knowledge obtained from references, several assumptions and interpretation. Because of the unavailability of a model‐based conflict detection and resolution tool, the tool could not be evaluated in simulations.

After being integrated into a model‐based decision support tool, it can reduce the deficiencies of the model‐based tool such as low degree of resolution acceptance by controllers and low‐resolution speed by providing expert air traffic controller knowledge to the tool.