CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

4. CONFLICT AND GROUP DECISION MAKING: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MOTIVATION 123
literature on GrouP neGotiation
The Role of Social Motives in Negotiation Processes and Outcomes
Research on the effects of social motives on group negotiation and decision
making has concentrated mainly on two-party (dyadic) negotiations.
Fortunately, there are also some studies that have focused on larger teams,
and these are relevant to the purpose of this chapter. Within the negotiation
tradition, typically, ad hoc groups of participants are assembled in
the laboratory, one or more of the “sources” of social motives previously
discussed are either measured or manipulated, and groups perform a
negotiation simulation.
In such a simulation, group members receive information about
the negotiation case and the issues at stake. To measure the quality
of group decision making, researchers examine negotiation outcomes.
Each member receives a “profit schedule” in which he or she can see
how much each possible agreement is worth. In a typical negotiation
simulation, individual pay-offs are negatively correlated, such that
when one party does better, others do worse. However, negotiators’
outcomes often are not perfectly diametrically opposed. Instead, like
real-life negotiations, the simulations have integrative potential, in that
one party’s gains do not equal others’ losses. Thus, parties can achieve
high outcomes when they trade off losses on unimportant issues for
gains on more important ones.
Negotiating team members can choose from a range of so-called integrative
behaviors including the exchange of information about preferences
and priorities, trading off losses on issues that are relatively unimportant
for gains on more important issues (i.e., logrolling), and the cooperative
creation of value, and distributive behaviors including competitive claiming,
the use of threats and punitive capabilities, and the communication
of persuasive arguments and positional commitments (i.e., statements of
“final offers”; Pruitt & Carnevale, 1993). Integrative behaviors are more
likely to lead to effective decision making than distributive behaviors. In
addition to this, team negotiations have the interesting feature that the
outcome preferences of the individual team members can be structured
asymmetrically, such that multiple parties may share the same interests
on more than one issue, such that one faction of parties with similar preferences
on multiple issues may face another faction with opposing preferences
on these issues. For negotiators facing such a situation, forming a
coalition, i.e. “any subset of a group that pools its resources or unites as a
single voice to determine a decision for the entire group” (Murnighan &
Brass, 1991), can be a lucrative option.
In the following we will give an overview of negotiation studies that
have investigated the impact of social motives on group decision making.
In a lab study by Beersma and De Dreu (1999) on three-person negotiations,
social motive was manipulated by reward structure (i.e., team