CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

4. CONFLICT AND GROUP DECISION MAKING: THE ROLE OF SOCIAL MOTIVATION 139
confronted with those high on proself motives shifted toward a more
proself motivation, whereas individuals identified as high on proself
motives tended to stick to their orientation and “exploited” more prosocial
individuals (see also Chatman & Barsade, 1995; Steinel & De Dreu,
2004). The findings by Weingart et al. (2003), discussed earlier in this
chapter, are in line with this.
This suggests asymmetrical contagion of social motivation: Proself
motives tend to be more contagious than prosocial ones. As an aside, this
is one of the major propositions of structural adaptation theory (SAT; see
Ellis, Hollenbeck, Ilgen, Humphrey, & Li, 2006; Johnson et al., 2006; Moon
et al., 2004). According to SAT, it is easier for individuals and groups to
move to a more chaotic, less ordered structure than to a more ordered one.
Like physical systems, social systems are differentiated by their degree of
complexity, and more energy is required to maintain the structure of complex
systems than simpler ones. In terms of complexity, structures that
embody high levels of interdependence and mutual adjustment between
individuals are more complex relative to those where each individual is
an independent decision-making agent concerned only with his or her
own outcomes. Thus, as a proself context requires less organization and
coordination than a prosocial one, SAT would predict that having a proself
minority in an otherwise prosocial group would make the group as
a whole shift to a proself motive. It is interesting to investigate whether
this process could undermine the positive effects of prosocial motivation
on convergent tasks and, likewise, whether having a proself minority in
an otherwise prosocial group may benefit performance on divergent tasks
because of the same process. Studies examining this question could also
vary the extent to which certain group members are empowered by the
group’s decision procedures and rules (cf. Ten Velden et al., 2007) to examine
whether power position affects the influence of different team members’
social motives.
We also believe that studying the impact of conflict types on further
group decision making is a topic that deserves attention. In the experimental
studies on the effects of conflict on further decision making that
have been conducted so far, a conflict of interests or negotiation-type conflict
task has been used to induce conflict (cf. Beersma & De Dreu, 2005;
Beersma, Hollenbeck, et al., 2007). According to McGrath (1984), two types
of conflict can be distinguished: (a) conflicts over interests and over points
of view or (b) cognitive conflict. Likewise, Druckman and colleagues
(Druckman, Rozelle, & Zechmeister, 1976; Druckman & Zechmeister, 1973)
distinguished between three types of conflict: (a) conflicts over interests,
(b) intellective conflicts (conflicts about “who is right” in which the topic
over which there is a conflict could ultimately be objectively verified), and
(c) evaluative conflicts (conflicts over “who is right” in which the topic
over which there is a conflict is a matter of taste or opinion). Some scholars
argued that the type of conflict does not matter in determining its effects
on decision making. For example, Tjosvold (1998) argued that for future