CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

5. DISSENT AS A FACILITATOR 169
preferred in the group (a convergent search strategy), both types of dissent
facilitated the consideration of information that was in support of the
opposite alternative (e.g., a more divergent information search). However,
authentic dissent had a much stronger effect than contrived dissent.
It would be premature to interpret the partially divergent results of
these studies with regard to contrived dissent as the dependent variables
were different (thought generation vs. information search) and as Nemeth
and her colleagues collected data at the individual level, whereas Schulz-
Hardt et al. (2002) compared authentic and contrived dissent at the group
level. However, the latter difference offers an interesting (although yet
completely untested) possibility: In the Schulz-Hardt et al. study, all of the
group members (including the devil’s advocate) contributed to the results.
In contrast, Nemeth, Brown, and Rogers (2001) measured only responses
of those group members who were not the devil’s advocate. Thus, the
results (being more favorable for devil’s advocacy in the Schulz-Hardt et
al. study than in those of Nemeth, Brown, and Rogers study) would interlock
smoothly if the devil’s advocates especially benefited from devil’s
advocacy. This, of course, would be a substantial difference between contrived
dissent and authentic dissent, since in the latter case the ones who
are exposed to minority dissent (rather than advocating it themselves) seem
to benefit more.
Whereas such considerations are speculative, the results of the few
comparative studies are consistent in demonstrating that contrived dissent
is less effective than authentic dissent in stimulating divergent thinking,
creativity, and performance. Consequently, dialectical techniques are
an option if authentic dissent is not available (or is considered to be too
expensive—see also the final section), but if organizations have a real
choice between designing heterogeneous teams with regard to members’
prediscussion opinions or using dialectical decision techniques, the former
seems to be more promising than the latter.
ConClusion
Dissent, Creativity, and Performance: What Have We Learned So Far?
As outlined in the previous sections, conflict need not always be negative
and dysfunctional. More specifically, if task-related conflict results
from dissenting opinions being voiced, this type of conflict can be beneficial
to both individual and collective creativity and performance. We have
shown that dissent in general (i.e., independent of the type of dissent) has
an activating effect by intensifying individual information processing
and group discussion. Furthermore, exposure to minority and majority
dissent has been shown to result in partially different consequences for
individual information processing: In cases of unidirectional influence,
majority dissent induces convergent thinking toward the majority, whereas