CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

4. CONFLICT AND GROUP DECISION MAKING: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MOTIVATION 133
eration and commitment to decisions without sacrificing decision quality.
This is interesting in light of findings within the field of group negotiation
by Beersma and De Dreu (2003), who showed that procedural fairness is a
crucial mediator of the effects of prosocial motives on decision quality in
negotiation. Apparently, when team leaders and members approach decision
making in a prosocial way, this enhances procedural fairness perceptions
and thereby decision quality.
Other findings that might lead us to conclude that a prosocial motive
has positive effects on conflict management and team decision making
come from a study by Amason (1996). The results of his study of 53 top
management teams in the United States showed that conflict could benefit
decision quality as long as positive, cognitive disagreement in the teams
was not accompanied by dysfunctional affective conflict. According to
Amason, a cooperative context would reduce the tendency for cognitive
disagreements to arouse affective conflict.
Janssen, Van de Vliert, and Veenstra’s (1999) findings also attest to the importance
of a cooperative context in determining the conflict–performance
relationship in teams. In their study, members of management teams
rated the extent to which they perceived cooperative interdependence in
their team. They also rated task conflict, person conflict, integrative and
distributive conflict behavior, decision quality, and the affective acceptance
of the decisions that were made. Results revealed that a cooperative
context was especially important in the case where teams experienced
high levels of both task and person conflict. Specifically, when person
conflict arose alongside task conflict, it was vital that team members
perceived cooperative interdependence. High levels of perceived interdependence
resulted in less distributive and more integrative conflict
behavior relative to when cooperative interdependence was perceived as
low. Also, under circumstances of high task conflict combined with high
person conflict, perceptions of positive interdependence were related to
high decision quality and high affective acceptance of decisions. Janssen
et al. concluded that, when person conflict interferes with task conflict,
team members need to perceive a cooperative context in order to engage
in cooperative conflict behavior, which eventually enables them to perform
well.
Related to this, Simons and Peterson (2000) conducted a study in which
they collected data about conflict and decision making from 70 top management
teams of U.S. based hotel companies. Their data show that, in top
management teams in which there was low interpersonal trust, task conflict
was dealt with in a more aggressive way than in teams characterized
by high trust. Also, in the former, low-trust teams, task conflict was more
often related to dysfunctional relationship conflict. They also found that
in those top management teams in which members raised their voices to
one another, task conflict was more strongly related to relationship conflict
than in teams where this as not the case. As low levels of trust and
elevating one’s voice are probably related to, or indicative of, insufficiently