Abstract
We examined how the distribution of information among team members and accountability pressures affected the quality of negotiated settlements reached among teams of friends negotiating against teams of strangers. The main conclusions of the experiment may be summarized by the following findings: (1) Teams of strangers reaped a greater share of the joint profit than did teams of friends when teammates were accountable to a supervisor as opposed to negotiating strictly on their own behalf. (2) Teams of strangers also reaped a marginally greater share of the joint profit than did teams of friends when teammates possessed unique, as opposed to common, information about their own team's preferences. (3) Not surprisingly, teams of friends were more cohesive than were teams of strangers; however, teams of friends were also more concerned about maintaining their relationship than were teams of strangers. (4) Teams of friends felt least cohesive when they were accountable to a supervisor, whereas teams of strangers felt most cohesive when they were accountable. Similarly, friends indicated greater relationship concerns when having to deal with distributed information, whereas information distribution had no effect on the relationship concerns of strangers. (5) For teams of strangers, greater team cohesiveness was positively correlated with better performance. (6) Moreover, when teams of strangers felt more cohesive than their opponents, they earned more than teams of strangers who felt less cohesive.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 364-383 |
Number of pages | 20 |
Journal | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes |
Volume | 72 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Dec 1997 |
Funding
The research in this paper was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation SES-8921926 and PYI-9157447. The research in this paper was performed while the second author was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, with support from NSF grant #SBR-9022192. Address reprint requests to Erika Peterson, Department of Psychology, George Washington University, 2125 G Street, NW, Washington, DC 20025. 364
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Applied Psychology
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management