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Purpose: 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. Design/methodology/approach: 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. Findings: 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. Practical implications: 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. Originality/value: 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – What is the discipline's current grasp of cognitive biases in negotiation processes? What lessons can be drawn from this body of literature? The purpose of this paper is to review and discuss the limited research on cognitive biases in the context of negotiations. Design/methodology/approach – This article reviews research from judgment and decision-making, conflict management, psychology, and management literatures to systematize what we already know about cognitive biases in negotiations. Findings – Decision-making studies have mainly identified 21 biases that may lead to lower quality decisions. Only five of those biases have been studied relating to negotiations: the anchoring, the overconfidence, the framing, the status quo and the self-serving bias. Moreover, negotiation literature has identified five additional biases that affect negotiation processes: the fixed-pie error, the incompatibility error, the intergroup bias, the relationship bias and the toughness bias. Biased behavior differs across cultures and emotional mood. Research limitations/implications – Implications for future research include building comprehensive models of how negotiators can overcome cognitive biases, studying interconnections between different biases, and increasing complexity of the studies to provide practitioners with more practical advice. Originality/value – The literature reviewed in this paper spans diverse disciplines and perspectives. This paper can be a starting point for researchers interested in understanding how cognitive biases affect negotiations. Moreover, it could be a starting point for future research on this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the affective factors underlying conflict behavior. Traditional conflict research assumes that when individuals face conflicts they follow a rational process, thus denying the role of emotion-relevant variables. Design/methodology/approach – In total, 358 undergraduate students from the University of Santiago de Compostela were classified into four different affective groups (happy, inactive, sad, and surprised) based on their actual emotional experience and asked to complete ROCI-II. ANOVA were conducted to test hypotheses. Findings – Results reveal that affective groups statistically differ in their self-reported conflict management styles. Positive moods and feelings have been found to be related to the preference for more cooperative strategies. Research limitations/implications – This study is exploratory in nature and since hypotheses were only partly supported, future research should address this topic in depth. Practical implications – It has been suggested that, in order to handle conflicts properly, individuals should take into account both their cognition and emotion. Originality/value – This paper sheds light on current research in the prediction of conflict behavior by examining the impact of affect out from the lab. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the unique effect that shared metacognition has on negotiation – over and above the effect of simply having similar views. Design/methodology/approach – An experiment was conducted where it was systematically varied whether the negotiators explicitly knew or did not know that their opponent had a similar view of the negotiation task. Findings – Results showed that having shared metacognition promoted: cooperative negotiation, accurate insight into the opponent's point values (which was correlated with increased joint gain), and increased satisfaction regarding the negotiation outcome. Moreover, this was the case across different conditions in which negotiators' negotiation task view and motivation were varied. Practical implications – The paper suggests that negotiators and mediators can benefit by developing a common understanding of the negotiation and explicitly exchanging this understanding with each other (establishing shared metacognition) prior to engaging in the negotiation. Future studies should examine closely the underlying process of shared metacognition in terms of its impact on negotiation. Originality/value – Prior research suggests that successful, integrative negotiation depends on negotiators' view of the negotiation task and whether they hold similar views of the negotiation task (shared cognition). Implicit in this research is that the negotiating parties not only had similar views of the negotiation task but also may have explicitly known that they did so (shared metacognition). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose — The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between demographic characteristics, job stress, and cognitive and affective conflict faced by Chinese top managers and how this conflict is resolved over multiple rounds of conflict situations. Design/methodology/approach — A questionnaire was designed and submitted to Chinese top managers of firms located in Sichuan Province, PRC. Besides Likert-type questions concerning demographic characteristics, job stress, and both types of conflict, contextual anchorage method was used to let top managers rank the conflict resolution styles they would prefer for solving a given situation of conflict. Findings — Data were submitted to hierarchical regression analysis. It was found that age is in negative relation with job stress and that the higher the education level of top managers, the more cognitive conflict they will experience. In turn, the more cognitive conflict, the more affective conflict will be experienced. In addition, it was found that job stress is in positive association with cognitive conflict. Finally and most importantly, the findings indicated that Chinese top managers are inclined to using integrating to handle conflict. This seems to be generally inconsistent with traditional Chinese culture. Originality/value — The paper accounted for respective calls that proposed to focus on the antecedent conditions of cognitive and affective conflict. Therefore, a framework containing important antecedent factors of conflict was proposed. As a first attempt, it integrated the relationship between job stress and conflict. Most importantly, and also as a first attempt, however, this study sought to identify the conflict resolution styles Chinese top managers applied over multiple rounds of conflict situations, whereas findings additionally differentiate between affective and cognitive types of conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]