CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

130 BEERSMA, CONLON, AND HOLLENBECK
literature on teaM DeCision MaKinG
The Role of Social Motives in Decision-Making Processes and Outcomes
Group negotiation is one area in which research has been conducted
on conflict and group decision making. Although this research has taught
us a lot about the effects of social motives on conflict management processes
and team decision making, the operationalization of team decision
making used in this area of research is rather limited. Studies have
almost exclusively focused on negotiation outcomes. In real-life groups,
there is, of course, much more to decision making than only the specific
outcomes of a situation in which the team members were confronted
with conflicting interests. After dealing with conflict, teams have to
return to their everyday tasks and perform effectively. The question
of interest is therefore whether and how conflict affects team decision
making in a broader sense, that is, not only during the conflict episode
itself. As our focus is especially on the influence of social motives during
conflict, we are specifically interested in those studies that examined
the influence of social motives on the relationship between conflict and
team decision making.
A first question is whether social motivation affects conflict management
processes in broader decision-making settings as it has been shown
to do in negotiation. Studies that have examined the influence of team
members’ agreeableness (an individual difference) on team outcomes suggest
that this is indeed the case. Barrick et al. (1998) conducted a study
among 51 work teams and found that teams with a particularly disagreeable
member and teams with a low average team score on agreeableness
experienced more conflict, were less cohesive, and performed less
effectively according to their supervisors than teams that did not have
such a disagreeable person in the team or had a higher average agreeableness
score. These findings can be understood by looking at studies on
the effects of agreeableness on individual conflict management strategies.
For example, Graziano et al. (1996), as well as Jensen-Campbell, Graziano,
and Hair (1996), found that individuals high on agreeableness preferred
constructive negotiation and disengagement strategies above strategies
based on power. The opposite was true for individuals low on agreeableness.
Moberg (2001), who also focused on how individuals manage conflict,
distinguished four conflict management strategies: nonconfrontation
(handling conflict indirectly by minimizing differences, avoidance, or
withdrawal), confrontation (handling conflict directly by facing or discussing
issues straightforwardly), compromising (handling conflict by
conceding and problem solving), and control (handling conflict directly
by competing, contending, or dominating). He found that agreeableness
was positively related to compromising and negatively related to control,
providing more evidence that agreeableness leads to more constructive
conflict management.