Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior - Soltanieh ...

334 LAURIE R. WEINGART AND KAREN A. JEHN
working with other people like themselves (Schei, Rognes, and De Dreu, 2008 ). As implied
earlier, cooperative groups can become too cooperative, resulting in compromise (giving
in rather than problem solving) and suboptimal agreements. This is most likely to occur
when they do not have a strong reason to resist yielding, for example when they are under
time pressure, have low aspirations, have bad alternatives, or are not accountable to others
(De Dreu et al., 2000 ; Pruitt and Rubin, 1986 ).
To remedy the above, individualistically motivated group members can adopt problem
solving to achieve their goals as a way to avoid impasse and cooperative group members
may adopt more competitive strategies to protect themselves from being dominated by
individualists who do not want to cooperate. However, the latter is more likely (Kelly and
Stahelski, 1970 ). Faced with conflicting member motives, cooperative negotiators have
been shown to become more competitive than individualists are to become more cooperative
(Weingart, Brett, Olekalns, and Smith, 2007 ).
Although cooperatives will shift their overall approach toward competition as the number
of individualists increases, they may also attempt to shift the interaction back to cooperation
by strategically interjecting collaborative behaviors. For example, cooperatives who were in
the minority in negotiating groups responded to attempts by individualists to claim value by
providing information that could be used to find mutually beneficial agreements (i.e. integrative
information). They also rewarded the individualists for providing integrative information
by reciprocating with additional integrative information (Weingart et al., 2007 ).
Whereas these orientations (called “ social value orientations ” in the research literature)
are treated as relatively stable individual differences, situational cues can also infl uence
one ’s propensity to collaborate. As such, moving a group toward collaboration would
require either changing the composition of the team to all cooperative members (via turnover
and selection) or providing strong cues about the collaborative nature of the task and
the cooperative motives of others. Team members can be instructed to adopt a cooperative
approach or be incentivized, making cooperation in everyone ’s self - interest. Instructions
from a supervisor or rewards for high joint value agreements have been shown to be effective.
The expectation that team members will continue to interact on cooperative tasks
in the future ( “ expected cooperative future interaction ” ) has also been shown to increase
cooperative motives (De Dreu et al., 2000 ). Finally, team members can adjust their motives
in response to the behaviors of others in the group. Cooperative actions by others can
serve as a signal of willingness to collaborate, but individualistically oriented members also
need assurances that cooperation is in their own self - interest (Locke et al., 2001 ).
Epistemic motives. People with high epistemic motivation have a desire to gain knowledge,
think deeply, and more thoroughly process information. They engage in more deliberative
and systematic processing (De Dreu and Carnevale, 2003 ). In that people with high epistemic
motivation process information more thoroughly and are more likely to revise their
view of a given situation (De Dreu, Koole, and Steinel, 2000 ), it is likely they would make
strong contributions to collaborative teams.
People with low epistemic motivation are believed to solve problems and make
decisions using heuristic processing, which is relatively quick and effortless. Low epistemic
motivation has been shown to impede the quality of information processing and the collaborativeness
of group decision making. Research on negotiation shows that low epistemic
motivation increases reliance on stereotypes and irrelevant anchoring information