CONFLICT MANAGEMENT The Psychology of conflict and conflict ...

442 CARNEVALE
ments; gain and loss frame, which sometimes lessens the likelihood of
agreement and sometimes produces high quality agreements; even cooperativeness
and competitiveness as individual dispositions can go either
way with the most competitive person in the group becoming the most
cooperative in the right circumstances. All of this points to the remarkable
plasticity of the human character, to use a phrase spoken by Bandura.
Even conflict itself has good and bad effects, as noted by Schultz-Hardt
et al. (chapter 5, this volume), as well as Deutsch et al. (2006), and others
(e.g., Coser, 1956). And Pruitt (chapter 8, this volume) made the same point
about escalation sometimes having positive consequences for individuals
and organizations. Sometimes, our variables are triple edged, having
no effects under some circumstances; for example, communication processes—such
as the sight of the other—can sometimes have a positive
impact and sometimes a negative impact on negotiation, and sometimes
it just makes no difference, as hinted by Olekalns, Putnam, Weingart, and
Metcalf (chapter 3, this volume). These authors further noted a particularly
interesting aspect of communication: the advent of new communication
technologies that are likely to alter the face of conflict management
dramatically in the future.
If there is one thing about the study of conflict in the workplace that
we can all agree on, it is that there are, today, a lot more people doing it
than there was 50 years ago. And the people who are doing it come from
a wide array of disciplines and countries, which means two things: the
study of culture is now at the forefront, and so are efforts at cutting across
disciplinary boundaries. A case in point is the recent edited volume by
Carnevale and De Dreu (2006) that contained 25 chapters about method
in the study of social conflict, written by scholars in political science, psychology,
organization behavior, economics, law, and so on.
But there are clear exciting destinations on the horizon, and many of
the essays in this volume pointed the way. For example, the work on positive
psychology, civility in the workplace, and spirituality seems ripe for
integration with the broader study of organizational conflict (Ashforth
& Pratt, 2003). And integrating current models of decision making, such
as prospect theory and the notion of framing, with models of affect and
motivation is clearly a hot direction (Carnevale, 2007). Both reflect trends
in the broader disciplines; for example, we now see broad efforts to integrate
models of emotion with decision theory (Novemsky & Kahneman,
2005). Given the trend to brain imaging in social psychology and neuroeconomics,
we can see brain-imaging studies of organizational conflict on
the horizon. These are all exciting developments with great potential as
the field moves forward.