CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

1. CONFLICT IN THE WORKPLACE 13
are cast within the in-group context, where benefiting oneself hurts the
interests of other individuals within the team, and vice versa.
Bornstein (2003) argued that when parties are groups rather than individuals,
individuals experience mixed-motive interdependence within their
in-group, as well as with the out-group. Consider a group of soldiers waiting
to surprise attack their enemy. On both sides, each group is best off when
all its group members fight hard and heroicly, thus increasing the probability
of total victory and fending off the chances of total defeat. Within each
group, however, individual members are better off playing hide-and-seek
while their in-group members take the lead and fight hard and heroicly; the
individual benefits from his or her group members’ heroic actions yet minimizes
the personal risk of injury. Obviously, when all group members think
and act this way, they become collectively vulnerable, and each individual
is worse off by not fighting than by fighting collectively.
The team-game analysis reveals that hostility toward the out-group is
often perceived as cooperative, loyal behavior by members of one’s ingroup,
and vice versa, cooperative and conciliatory behavior toward an
outgroup may be perceived, by one’s fellow ingroup members, as disloyal
behavior that jeopardizes the in-group’s fate. Consequently, groups tend
to less cooperative with one another than individuals are in an interpersonal
situation (Mikolic, Parker, & Pruitt, 1997; Robert & Carnevale, 1997;
Wildschut, Pinter, Vevea, Insko, & Schopler, 2003). This reveals the doubleedged-sword
character of mixed-motive interdependencies within and
between groups. On the one hand, intergroup conflicts tend to escalate
more easily into cycles of exceedingly hostile exchanges, but on the other
hand, within groups, cooperation is stimulated and team members are
more motivated to work hard (Bornstein & Erev, 1997).
Summary and Synthesis. Resource conflicts emerge when and because
individual, group, and organizational interests are misaligned, so that
choices that benefit interests at one level hurt the interests at another level.
This follows from a basic social dilemma analysis, but also from a more
sophisticated analysis of organizations as nested social dilemmas, and of
mixed-motive interdependencies in team games. By applying and extending
interdependency theory, we can thus understand where resource conflicts
come from and predict that they will be more complex, and more
likely to escalate, as one moves up from the individual, to the group, to the
organization level of analysis. The chapters in this volume illustrate this
insight. For example, resource conflicts are the source of frustration and
stress at the individual level (Spector & Bruk-Lee, chapter 9, this volume),
the source of competition and escalation at the dyad and group levels
(Pruitt, chapter 8, this volume), and the driving force behind union–management
relations over the last century (Friedman et al., chapter 12, this
volume). Moving up a level, research has shown that competition over
resources in the community context can also affect negative attitudes
within organizational contexts as well (Brief et al., 2005). In all, resource