Conclusions

Even though there is extensive literature related to conflict management, it is very limited if we look for field investigation that back up this idea beyond a theoretic level.

The conclusions that can be obtained from this investigation are many. On one hand, it has been notably detected that there are clearly differentiated focuses, both in academic and professional fields, on managing conflicts among the internal stakeholders in a project, depending on the originating cause of the conflict.

On the other hand, that the role and the assigned responsibilities within a project have a direct influence on the way that the conflicts are tackled, while being independent of the origin of said conflict.

This study has implications for training of future project managers, and as professors of project management courses, we have been made aware of the importance of implementing an additional component in the teaching plan, specifically oriented to help lead the students to have a better understanding of the different conflict management strategies, as well as their causing sources. Also will be interesting the inclusion of the professional point of view, especially in each conflict sources in which professional's strategic selection differs from students, because there could be the experience learning.

After having obtained the results from this study, we believe that there are several research lines related with conflict management, that can still be studied, one of the most important being the analysis of the impact that the choice of every strategy has on the management of the expectations and the engagement of the project stakeholders.

A separate line, indirectly related to the previous one, would be the search for a more direct correlation between the project's performance and the different strategies that have been adopted. Taking into consideration the experience accumulated in the present investigation, we consider it to be important to obtain a more objective measurement of project performance in future research.

Another possibility would be to analyze the impact of the different conflict sources, in order to weigh the importance of each type of management, regardless of the project, thus being able to concentrate the training and efforts of the PMs on those strategies that have a greater effect on the conflicts of greater impact.

And lastly, we believe that due to the fact that the analysis has been contrasted only with a control group of professionals and coming only from the consultancy sector, it could be interesting to broaden the results with a comparative from different sectors, and a bigger sample to have not a control group but significant data for professional field. Refer