CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

4. CONFLICT AND GROUP DECISION MAKING: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MOTIVATION 129
to depend on the motive of the negotiator. Prosocial negotiators might find
an integrative agreement yielding high joint outcomes very effective, but
proself negotiators might favor an agreement in which they do well for
themselves, albeit at the costs of others. As a counterargument, it seems
highly unlikely that the organizations in which negotiating teams function
would not see integrative outcomes yielding optimal group outcomes
as the best possible decisions these teams can make, certainly when we
keep in mind that nonintegrative solutions leave “money on the table”
and do not use the resources available to negotiators optimally.
Furthermore, one might argue that the negotiation tasks used in
the studies previously presented are “rigged” so as not to be zero sum,
whereas the real world is often marked by zero sum games. However,
there are good reasons to doubt this position. Many real-life negotiation
situations do have integrative potential, but negotiators fail to realize this
because of premature judgment, assuming that the negotiation situation
is a “fixed pie” and searching for a single answer without considering
inventing issues to add to the negotiation agenda (Fisher & Ury, 1981;
Pruitt & Carnevale, 1993; Thompson & Hastie, 1990). Fortunately, research
by Neale and Northcraft (1986) showed that experienced negotiators are
less susceptible to this view of negotiations as a zero-sum game and that
they realize the integrative possibilities that many real-life negotiation
situations possess.
Interestingly, taking a closer look at the negotiation studies reviewed
here reveals that even from an individualistic point of view, prosocial
negotiators often do better than proself negotiators. Attempts at claiming
too much of the negotiation pie for oneself often meet with resistance on
the part of team members which often leads to a costly impasse. Even if
one has a proself motive, following an integrative strategy and arriving at
an integrative outcome is, on average, a lucrative option.
Even if we accept that joint negotiation outcomes are indeed valid
operationalizations of decision quality, we might still ask whether the
different “sources” of social motives in teams (e.g., dispositional differences,
situational variables) all affect negotiation processes and decision
quality in the same way. In reply to this, a meta-analysis of 28 negotiation
studies by De Dreu et al. (2000) showed that different sources of
social motivation are functionally equivalent; when a certain variable
triggers a prosocial motive, conflict management is more constructive
than when it triggers a proself motive, and no differences between dispositional
and situational variables were observed. However, there is
one caveat to these results. Of the 28 studies in the meta-analysis, most
involved dyads and only two employed teams as the unit of analysis.
However, as we have no theoretical reasons to assume that different
sources of social motives would not be functionally equivalent in team
negotiations, and the results of the studies described here do not imply
otherwise, we conclude that the meta-analytic findings are likely to generalize
to team negotiations.