CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

5. DISSENT AS A FACILITATOR 171
in understanding how these effects are brought about has been made.
Nevertheless, important theoretical and practical issues regarding these
facilitative effects of dissent are still poorly understood. We finish our
chapter by outlining some important theoretical and practical questions
for future research in this area. We start with theoretical issues and then
turn to more practical questions concerning the effective design of and
facilitating conditions for dissent effects in organizations.
Mediators of the Differential Minority Versus Majority Dissent Effects. As
we have previously outlined, minority dissent induces divergent thinking,
whereas majority dissent leads to convergent thinking. What we do
not yet know is how minority versus majority dissent brings about these
different information-processing styles. Nemeth (1986) discussed two
possible explanations: On the one hand, majority dissent should induce
more stress among the recipients than minority dissent does. Because
high stress leads to a focussing of attention, the recipients of majority dissent
exhibit convergent processing (focus on one perspective, namely that
of the majority). In contrast, the moderate stress induced by minorities
should stimulate a widened focus of attention, that is, divergent processing.
On the other hand, people exposed to dissent should immediately
assume that a majority is right and a minority is wrong. Therefore, people
exposed to majority dissent focus on the presumed truth, namely
the majority perspective. In contrast, if people experience that a minority
consistently advocates a dissenting opinion, they ask themselves how
someone can be so sure about something that is so wrong—which should
stimulate an open reappraisal of the situation. However, as of yet no considerable
attempts have been made to empirically test any of these two
hypothesized mediations or any other explanations—so this obviously is
a central topic in need of investigation.
The Role of Behavioral Styles. If minority dissent induces divergent thinking
among the majority members by making them wonder how someone
can be so sure about something that must be wrong, then the premise of
this is that the minority is consistent in advocating its dissenting opinion.
In other words, divergent thinking induced by minority dissent requires
or is at least substantially facilitated by consistency over time. Interestingly,
the behavioral style of the minority is a central variable in another
theory of minority influence, namely conversion theory (Moscovici, 1980),
and consistency has been shown to be the most important feature of
successful minorities. Since research on this theory is only very loosely
related to creativity and performance, we have not discussed it in this
chapter. In sharp contrast to that, research on convergent versus divergent
thinking induced by majorities versus minorities has largely ignored the
role of consistency or other behavioral styles of the minority (for an exception,
see Nemeth et al., 1990). As a consequence, we do not know whether
minorities have to exhibit some consistency in order to induce divergent