CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

126 BEERSMA, CONLON, AND HOLLENBECK
rule condition were informed that a decision could be implemented when
a majority (that is, two out of three team members) favored this decision
(cf. Mannix, Thompson, & Bazerman, 1989). As in the study by Beersma
and De Dreu (1999), social motive was again manipulated using reward
structure. Results indicated that when the negotiation task was asymmetrically
structured, teams engaged in more distributive and less integrative
behavior. Also, in an asymmetrical (but not symmetrical) task structure,
unanimity rule resulted in low joint outcomes when teams had a proself
rather than prosocial motive.
The results of Beersma, Kooij, Ten Velden, and De Dreu (2007) were in
line with this. Rather than manipulate social motivation, they measured
team members’ agreeableness, and found that on an asymmetrical negotiation
task, teams low in agreeableness showed poor decision making
(e.g., low negotiation outcomes) under the unanimity rule. Summarizing,
the results of these studies show that team members’ social motives interact
with structural variables and that social motives become even more
important in decision-making situations where there is a risk of distributive
power play.
Unfortunately, in the work reviewed thus far, all members of one team
were given the same motivation, resulting in homogenously prosocial or
homogeneously proself teams. This yields only limited insight into the
processes and consequences caused by social motives in teams, because
in real-life teams motivational heterogeneity may be the rule rather than
the exception. It can be argued that in teams which members have mixed
social motives, team members will reciprocate each others’ behavior,
and therefore, the team will converge to the social motive of the majority
within the team. Thus, the more prosocial (as opposed to proself) team
members are, the more likely they will use integrative strategies, and the
less likely they will use distributive strategies. Alternatively, based on the
findings from experimental gaming research (Kelley & Stahelski, 1970),
one might argue an “asymmetrical contagion” effect of proself motivation,
such that having proself members in a team will have a disproportionate
effect on the negotiation processes because the behavior of even
one selfishly motivated member will put the other team members on the
defensive, forcing them to respond with distributive behavior. If this is the
case, teams with at least one proself member will use integrative behaviors
less and distributive behaviors more than teams in which there are
no proself members.
Although few studies have examined the possible consequences of
motivational heterogeneity in dyads (e.g., see Schei & Rognes, 2003),
research has only begun to investigate the effects of mixed social motives
in teams. As a case in point, Weingart, Brett, and Olekalns (2003) examined
the processes that occur in motivationally diverse teams. They compared
four person teams with zero, one, two, three, or four prosocially
motivated members (with any remaining team members holding a proself
motive). They found that teams consisting of all prosocial members