Finally, the present study provides some practical considerations. Developing effective
ways of managing conflict may have a marked benevolent effect on teams’ capacity to
function in an innovative fashion. Organizational teams that tend to employ cooperative
approaches to conflict, as suggested by our findings, presumably would be capable of
generating new knowledge and novel outcomes. Accordingly, training, especially for
teams evincing poor integrating conflict management skills, deems extremely important
in fostering the use of a cooperative approach (Tjosvold, 2006).
The results indicate that team-identity serves as a key mechanism engendering cooperative motivation, conducive to adoption of constructive conflict management patterns.
One of the major managerial practices to promote team-identity could be to increase
team members’ opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. Active participation in decision-making enhances involvement, commitment, and a sense of belonging, which lead to a higher level of team-identification (Tyler & Blader, 2003).
The findings have also showed the obstructing influence of relationship conflict on a
team’s tendency for constructive conflict management. To mitigate such destructive
impact team leaders could encourage team meetings, allowing to voice members’ individual concerns and thereby enhancing the congruency in attributions of other members’ intentions (Rentsch & Zelno, 2003).