CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

138 BEERSMA, CONLON, AND HOLLENBECK
sion after the first task, no performance differences between conditions
were found. From this work, we might thus conclude that norm formation
could be one reason why social motives during group negotiation affect
performance in a subsequent task.
The possibility that experiences with others’ behaviors, motives, and
expectations about how other group members will behave might play a
crucial role is also shown by the aforementioned study by Beersma, Hollenbeck,
et al. (2007). In their study, teams first engaged in a team command-and-control
simulation task under either prosocial (team reward)
or proself (individual reward) conditions. In a second task, all teams
transferred to a team reward structure. Before making the transition to
the new structure, a decision had to be made regarding the distribution
of team roles, and this was decided either by team negotiation, a possible
conflict-inducing state, or by the experimenter. Results showed that teams
with a prosocial history demonstrated more accurate performance when
the role-allocation was made for them, whereas teams with a proself history
showed more accurate performance when they negotiated the decision.
According to Beersma, Hollenbeck, et al. the difference between the
actual, experienced process relative to what team members expected was
the critical determining factor in terms of how conflict affects further performance.
Whereas in the negotiation condition, no differences between
previously proself and previously prosocial groups were found in actual
negotiation processes, previously prosocial teams expected the negotiation
to be cooperative and were unpleasantly surprised by the level of
conflict they were facing. Previously proself teams, however, expected
fierce competition and were relieved to see the conflict was not as harsh
as they expected.
One topic that future research should investigate is the extent to which
expectations and experiences of group members’ social motives drive the
effects on team decision making. For example, an intriguing question is:
Does knowledge about group members’ social motives already begin to
influence the decision-making strategies a team member opts for, even
when no actual interaction has taken place yet, or is interaction necessary
for the effects of social motives to occur? Related to this, future studies
could examine the mechanisms by which knowledge about group members’
social motives gets transferred within groups—do team members
learn about each others’ social motives by verbal cues or by more subtle
nonverbal cues?
Another relevant question is how heterogeneity of social motives in teams
affects team decision making. In the studies previously described on the
effects of social motives during negotiation on decision making, members
within a team were always given the same social motive. However,
as we also discussed in the section on negotiation studies, group members
often enter a decision-making process with different social motives,
resulting in motivational heterogeneity. Kelley and Stahelski (1970)
already showed that those identified as high on prosocial motives when