**2. Conflicts in organizations**

The debate whether the organizational conflict is positive or negative is an old one, scholars agree that conflicts are a natural part of the organizational life, and that the context and the management of the conflict will determine whether the conflict will be beneficial or harmful.

In their classical paper, Amason et al. [6] distinguished between two types of conflicts among teams in organizations: "C-type" and "A-type."

"C-type conflict" is a cognitive conflict that reflects disagreements among members of a team. This kind of conflict focuses on substantive, issue-related differences of opinion. The researchers claim that "C-type" conflict leads to better decisions and increased commitment, cohesiveness, empathy, and understanding among the team members.

"A-type conflict" is an affective conflict that contains disagreements over personalized, individually oriented matters that are largely detrimental to team performance. The roots of this type of conflict are very often tacit; therefore, it is difficult to manage or to solve it. According to Amason et al. [6], this type of conflict often provokes animosity among team members and may lead to poor decision quality, reduced progress and decreased commitment, cohesiveness, and empathy among the team members.

Amason et al.'s [6] conflict type resembles Jehn's [2] conflict dimensions: relationship conflict and task conflict. Relationship conflicts are disagreements regarding personal issues that are not related to the group's task such as personality clashes and annoying behavior of other group members. Task conflicts are disagreements among group members about opinions, ideas, and suggestions regarding the group's task [16]. The sum of these two dimensions is an indicator of overall conflict. Considering the similarity of Amason et al.'s [6] types and Jehn's [7, 8] dimensions, the relationship conflict can be defined as an "A-type" conflict, and the task conflict can be defined as a "C-type" conflict.

Avgar [9, 10] claimed that task conflict, that is, "C-type" conflict, amplifies the social capital in organizations, and relationship conflict, that is, "A-type" conflict reduces it. However, this statement is general because SC is a complex concept, and there are three levels of SC in organizations, and each level can influence conflicts and be affected by conflicts differently. The next section introduces the concept of SC and its levels in organizations.
