CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

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Conflict and Group Decision
Making: The Role of Social
Motivation
BianCa BeersMa
university of amsterdam
DonalD e. Conlon anD
John r. hollenBeCK
eli Broad College of Business, Michigan state university
Group decision making has become a crucial aspect of organizational
performance (Hackman, 1998; Ilgen, 1999). Within organizations, a great
variety of decision-making groups and teams exists—management teams,
command-and-control teams, cross-functional project teams, self-managed
work teams, as well as computer-assisted teams in which members are
located in different countries or continents. All of these teams have one
thing in common: Inevitably, conflicts arise regarding divergent ideas,
interests, or values held by individual team members. However, based
on current knowledge, it is hard to give a conclusive answer to the question
of how conflict and different methods for managing conflict affect a
groups’ ongoing processes and decision making.
Gaining insight into the factors that influence conflict and conflict management
in decision-making groups, as well as into how conflict and
conflict management in turn affect group processes and decision-making
performance, is thus important from both a theoretical and applied
perspective. In this chapter, we will focus especially on the role of social
motives—preferences for distributions of outcomes between oneself and
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