CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

5. DISSENT AS A FACILITATOR 165
The second question concerned what organizations can do if prediscussion
opinions are unknown before the team is formed or if the team is
supposed to work together over a series of tasks (e.g., a personnel selection
committee having to make a series of personnel selection decisions) so
that prediscussion dissent cannot be realized for every task. An opportunity
in situations like these is to form teams that are diverse with regard to
other aspects and to use such aspects that are known to be correlated with
dissent. For example, diversity of group members’ functional background
has consistently been shown to be facilitative of team performance, presumably
because it facilitates dissent and task-related conflict (for an overview,
see Williams & O’Reilly, 1998; a new integrative perspective is given by
van Knippenberg, De Dreu, and Homan, 2004; see also chapters 7 and 8,
this volume, for a more detailed treatment of diversity in groups). Hence,
by forming teams of specialists from different areas, organizations not
only make sure that diverse knowledge can be used for the task, they also
enhance the likelihood that dissenting opinions bearing the potential of
stimulating creativity and performance will prevail in the team.
Facilitating the Expression and Transformation of Dissent
For organizations to benefit from dissent, two conditions are necessary:
On the one hand, the existing dissent has to be expressed, and on the other
hand, the recipients have to properly react on this dissent. With regard
to the first condition, particularly minorities in organizations often withhold
diverging views (Stanley, 1981). This can be due to formal or informal
communication barriers (Baron & Greenberg, 1989), evaluation apprehension
(Gallupe, Bastianutti, & Cooper, 1991), or conformity pressures within
the group (Janis, 1982). However, unless expressed, dissent is useless. For
example, in the study by Schulz-Hardt et al. (2000), groups with a minority
member who, rather than consistently advocating his or her dissenting
opinion, converged to the majority position, exhibited the same confirmation
bias in information acquisition as consent groups did.
With regard to the second condition, even if dissent is expressed, the
recipients might fail to react on it due to ignorance, lack of motivation, or
lack of capacity or skills. In these cases, dissent is not transformed into
beneficial outcomes. Therefore, organizations should be interested in realizing
conditions that facilitate the expression and transformation of dissent.
Four factors seem to be particularly important with respect to this,
namely a unanimity decision rule, participation, dialectical leadership,
and critical norms.
First, the expression of dissent as well as the transformation of dissent
is facilitated if the group works under a unanimity rule, that is, for a solution
to be accepted, all group members have to agree to this solution. If
all members have to agree, minorities know that their opinions matter.
Moreover, majorities have to pay attention to minority statements under