Conflict management in work teams: The role of social self-efficacy and group identification

The current study focused on intra-group conflict by attempting to elucidate individual and situational factors underlying choices along two dimensions of conflict management patterns: engagement versus avoidance and constructive versus destructive. In the study, the role of two types of self-efficacy (global and social) among group members was investigated, as was the sense of group identification in team dispute resolution preferences modes. Sixty-seven members of volunteer community service communes in the Israeli Scouting youth movement, 48 females and 19 males, representing 13 intact teams, participated in the study. Self-report structured questionnaires (previously used and adapted for this study) served as research instruments. Both global set(efficacy and group identification independently predicted the conflict engagement-destructive pattern of domination. Social self-efficacy served as the sole predictor of the preference to manage intra-team conflict by means of integrating-the engagement-constructive mode. In contrast, the choice of compromising was also fostered by the joint contribution of social self-efficacy and group-identification, beyond the direct effect of social self-efficacy. The study corroborates the assumption that conflict management patterns within an intact team are related to dispositional variables on the individual level, i.e., global and social self-efficacy, and to the team-related variable of group identification.