CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

124 BEERSMA, CONLON, AND HOLLENBECK
rewards for high joint profits in the prosocial and individual rewards for
high individual profits in the proself condition). Results indicated that
prosocially motivated groups more often were able to achieve an integrative
agreement than groups which’ members had a proself motive. Moreover,
negotiations of prosocial groups ended in a costly impasse less often
than those of proself groups. The effect of social motive on negotiation
could be explained by higher levels of trust and more integrative and less
distributive behavior in prosocial teams.
A study by Weingart et al. (1993) was another example of research on
the effects of social motives on group decision making in a negotiation
context. Apart from examining the effects of social motives, Weingart et
al. also examined the interaction between social motives and agenda setting
(e.g., the way in which issues were considered). In negotiations, parties
can consider the issues either one by one or together, as a package.
Although the first option, called “sequential negotiation,” is a popular one
in many real-life negotiations (Thompson, Mannix, & Bazerman, 1988),
this procedure is likely to lead to suboptimal decision making in negotiations
with integrative potential. When parties negotiate about each issue
on the agenda one by one, they tend to overlook the possibility to trade off
losses on issues that yield lower outcomes for gains on issues that yield
higher outcomes, and, therefore, miss the opportunity of forming integrative
agreements. However, simultaneous consideration of issues may also
have its drawbacks in groups. Because team negotiations are more complex
compared with dyadic negotiations, as more parties’ interests and
preferences need to be addressed, considering issues simultaneously may
be too complicated for group members, leading to suboptimal decisions
as well.
The results of Weingart et al. (1993) revealed that proself teams considering
issues sequentially obtained lower profits than teams in all other
conditions, which did not differ from one another. An examination of the
negotiation processes of a number of teams that had participated in their
experiment showed that prosocial teams overcame the limitations associated
with sequential processing of issues by developing norms of reciprocity.
Whereas sequential issue consideration made the development of
package deals by explicit logrolling impossible, prosocial team members
would still reciprocate concessions on one issue with concessions on other
issues, even if the reciprocation were delayed. Although these findings
need to be interpreted with caution because they were based on post hoc
explanations and few cases, they do lead us to conclude that a prosocial
motive may not only be highly functional in team negotiations, but that
it can also overcome the influence of other variables that would otherwise
hinder the negotiation process. In the next section, we will address
in more detail studies that examined the influence of structural variables
that may moderate the effects of social motives on conflict management
and decision making in negotiation.