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Relationship conflict has important negative organizational and personal consequences. However, papers analyzing how to buffer the negative effects of relationship conflict at work-unit level are lacking. This study aims to extend the literature by examining which specific conflict management styles used by work teams (avoiding, integrating and compromising) reduce or increase the link between relationship conflict and collective emotional exhaustion.

Regression analysis was conducted using 91 teams (398 employees) from 42 hotels and 42 restaurants.

Results revealed that, as it was expected, relationship conflict was positively related to emotional exhaustion at a team level; this relationship depended on how team members handle relationship conflicts. That is, avoiding and integrating conflict management styles buffered the link between relationship conflict and collective emotional exhaustion, whereas compromising increased this positive link.

Organizations would include conflict management skills as a requirement for preventing negative consequences of conflict in teams, such as anxiety/depression and bullying.

By considering the unique perspective of team member’s shared perceptions of conflict management styles, important implications for the span of influence of collective perception of conflict on well-being have been indicated.

Most studies of conflict handling styles in organizations analyze these styles separately. These studies assume that individuals are oriented towards the use of one of the styles of conflict management. As a result, different styles are compared one by one as if they were independent. In contrast, from a more all‐embracing perspective people are seen as adopting configurations of styles. The interest in this alternative perspective lies in exploring the relations between these styles, how they combine and form patterns of conflict styles. This article presents an exploratory study that seeks to identify empirically the specific combinations of conflict handling styles that result in differentiated patterns within groups of managers. By using hierarchical and non‐hierarchical cluster analyses of a sample of managers, different patterns of conflict management were identified. The effectiveness of each of the resulting patterns was analyzed in terms of its influence on the parties' joint substantive outcomes and their mutual relationship. Results show that patterns using multiple conflict handling styles were more effective than patterns based on a single style.

The main aim of this study is to analyze the perception of influence tactics used by male and female representatives in order to gain the commitment of their constituencies when accounting for the outcomes reached in a collective bargaining round.

An experimental design was used to manipulate agreement – favorable vs unfavorable – using collective bargaining scenarios, and measurements were made of subjects' perceptions of the use of hard and soft influence tactics and constituency commitment. Participants stated which influence tactics they would use to inform their constituents about a positive or negative agreement, and the level of commitment they would expect from their constituency.

Results show that hard tactics are perceived as being more effective than soft tactics for enhancing constituency commitment to unfavorable results. Women perceive that they use more soft tactics than men to announce unfavorable agreements, while men perceive that they use more soft tactics than women to announce favorable agreements between parties. Overall, the perception of influence exercised over the constituency is strongly affected by gender, along the lines that men tend to explain and justify their successes and not their failures, while women tend to justify their failures and not their successes.

As the evidence in this study came from self‐report measures, future studies should corroborate findings by observing representative behavior.

The findings have important implications for training programs of representatives in collective bargaining, particularly in the exercise of influence at the second negotiation round.

The paper demonstrates that gender is an important moderator in representative‐constituency negotiation.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between self‐efficacy and the outcomes that individuals achieve when they manage conflict at work. The authors propose that self‐efficacy is related to performance following a positive linear or curvilinear model depending on the outcomes assessed (objective versus subjective outcomes) and the conflict setting considered (transaction versus dispute).

Two studies were conducted. Study 1 was a face‐to‐face transaction in which self‐efficacy was measured using a survey. In study 2, participants were involved in a dispute and their self‐efficacy was manipulated using a false feedback technique.

Results suggest that high self‐efficacy participants obtain better objective (economic/substantive) outcomes. However, there is a curvilinear relationship, in a U‐inverted shape, between self‐efficacy and subjective (relational) outcomes, indicating that an increase in self‐efficacy improves subjective outcomes, but there are certain levels at which self‐efficacy may be dysfunctional.

Recent controversial findings in research into the relationship between self‐efficacy and performance are addressed in these studies. The present paper is one of the first to explore the role of self‐efficacy in a dispute and to consider the effects of self‐efficacy on subjective outcomes. Practical implications are discussed in light of the results.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role that conflict management styles play in the relationship between interpersonal conflict and workplace bullying.

A survey study was conducted among 761 employees from different organizations in Spain.

Results suggest that an escalation of the conflict process from task related to relationship conflict may explain bullying situations to some extent. Regarding conflict management, attempts to actively manage conflict through problem solving may prevent it escalating to higher emotional levels (relationship conflict) and bullying situations; in contrast, other conflict management strategies seem to foster conflict escalation.

The correlational design makes the conclusions on causality questionable, and future research should examine the dynamic conflict process in more detail. On the other hand, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study empirically differentiating interpersonal conflict and workplace bullying.

This study explores how conflict management can prevent conflict escalating into workplace bullying, which has important implications for occupational health practitioners and managers.

Seeks to evaluate the link between task and relationship conflict, and their influence on some employees' affective reactions such as satisfaction, wellbeing, and propensity to leave a job; and to analyse the mediated and moderated role of relationship conflict.

The study involved 169 employees from six service organizations (hotels) in Andalusia (Spain). A questionnaire was used containing different measures: task and relationship conflict, wellbeing, job satisfaction, and propensity to leave the job.

The two types of conflict have different consequences. Data show that relationship conflict is negatively associated with affective reactions, while task conflict does not relate directly to affective reactions in a predictable way; relationship conflict has a positive influence on the desire to leave the current job, while task conflict does not affect it negatively; the interactive effect of relationships and task conflict shows that this interaction contributes substantially to predict the propensity to leave the current job; and relationship conflict mediates in the link between task conflict and affective reactions.

A high level of task conflict may backfire by boosting relationship conflict as well, thus having a negative effect on affective reactions. Thus some conclusions can be drawn with a view to improving conflict management in teams. First an attempt must be made to understand the type of conflict that is taking place. Second, managers should encourage open discussion of task‐related issues. Third, special attention should be paid to the level of each conflict because of its interactive effects on some affective outcomes. Thus, in spite of the generally beneficial effects associated with task conflict, the intensification of task‐related conflict may backfire when interacting with dysfunctional affective‐dissent.

Serves too analyze the mediated and moderated role of relationship conflict and to test the role of types of conflict on affective reactions such as wellbeing and propensity to leave the job.

This introductory paper aims to provide a contextualization of recent research and applications on work team effectiveness in organizational contexts carried out in Spain and Portugal and to describe connections between this research and the main trends in the international scene.

Since the 1990s, new occupational and organizational realities have deepened scientific interest in work teams in both Spain and Portugal. A range of recently published (1992‐2004) works in this area are reviewed. The selected sources are papers published in Spanish, Portuguese and international journals.

Reviewing this work, four major trends are identified that synthesize the key concerns of researches in both countries: work teams and new information/communication technologies; intra‐ and inter‐group conflicts in organizational contexts; definition, dimensions and measurement criteria for work team effectiveness; and teams in innovation and change processes.

This paper fulfils a panoramic vision of this research area in both Spain and Portugal, and provides an overview of the papers included in this special issue and an outlook for the future.