CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

136 BEERSMA, CONLON, AND HOLLENBECK
motivation, in contrast, value independence, personal success, and critical
attitudes, and this fits better with divergent performance. Put differently,
groups whose members have a prosocial motivation during conflict may
perform subsequent decision-making tasks better than groups whose
members have a proself motivation when the tasks require convergent
activity, but worse when the tasks require divergent activity.
In two experiments, Beersma and De Dreu (2005) found support for
this contingency idea. In the first study, the social motives of three-person
teams were manipulated using incentives, and post-negotiation performance
was measured by having teams engage in a task that had both convergent
and divergent aspects (e.g., producing advertisement slogans).
Results revealed that whereas a prosocial motive during negotiation
stimulated convergent post-negotiation performance (e.g., producing useful
slogans giving much information), a proself motive during negotiation
stimulated divergent post-negotiation performance (e.g., producing innovative,
original slogans). In a second experiment, Beersma and De Dreu
(2005) tested whether social motives independently affect decision making,
or whether this is only the case when team members’ social motives
have been acted upon in a conflict-evoking task. They manipulated social
motives and whether teams negotiated prior to a decision-making task.
Teams engaged either in a convergent planning task, in which they had
to come up with one solution to a specified problem, or in a divergent creativity
task, in which they had to come up with a variety of different ideas.
Results showed that a prosocial motive stimulated performance on the convergent
task, but decreased performance on the divergent task only when
teams negotiated prior to the team task. A proself motive during negotiation
had the opposite effect; it stimulated performance on the divergent
task and harmed performance on the convergent task. The answer to the
question of whether having prosocial and proself motives during conflict
helps or hinders group decision making thus seems to be that it depends
on whether the teams’ task requires convergence or divergence.
Interestingly, in an experiment, Goncalo and Staw (2006) replicated the
finding that a proself orientation stimulates creativity in divergent tasks.
They primed participants with either individualistic or collectivistic orientations,
concepts that are strongly related to proself and prosocial motives.
They found that in a brainstorming task, groups that had been primed
with an individualistic orientation generated more ideas and more highly
creative ideas, but only if they had received instructions to think divergently
(e.g., “be creative”) instead of convergently (e.g., “be practical”).
Although the above studies give us some insight into the effects of
social motives during conflict on group decision making, there are a number
of questions awaiting further research. For one, future studies should
examine in more detail which mediating processes are responsible for the
contingent effects of social motives during negotiation and post-negotiation
task type on team performance. It is important to note that Beersma
and De Dreu’s (2005) results showed that social motives affected group