Social psychology in Organizations specialization at Leiden University

Lecture 4: Decision Making and Team Conflict

Identity threat: being judged as a bad person

Business week ranking:

If you can convince others of your view you feel legitimized and can accomplish things

-Low ranking means identity threat

-Strategic recategorization:

• Affirm neglected positive aspects (zoom in)
• Explaining the negative evaluation

-Strategic (favorable) social comparison (zoom out)

If you can convince others of your view you feel legitimized and can accomplish things

Self-affirmation

Another strategy when facing identity threat

Self-affirmation is often used to decrease an identity threat

2 step procedure (K.Harber, 1995):

1. ranking of personal characteristics and values
2. take rank order number 1 and see how well you’re doing in it in your life

Self-affirmation can lead to:

-Higher grades, more abstract thinking, easier to maintain motivation

-More self-control

-More open-mindedness

Value conflict

Aimed at investigating interventions to solve value conflict

Interventions based upon

-decrease of identity threat

-Self-affirmation

-Other-affirmation --> people became more open-minded

General conflict resolution technique?

-values: for non-chosen charity -other-affirmation helped

-resources: for personal profit – other-affirmation didn’t help at all

Overconfidence in decision-making

Overestimation:

Of personal abilities, performance, chances of success or level of control

Overplacement:

The idea that you are better than others

Overprecision:

Certainty of precision of private beliefs

Hard-easy effect

In general: underestimation of performance on easy tasks and overestimate performance on hard tasks

Underplacement also occurs on hard tasks (others are better than you)

Illustartion of hard-easy effect:

More biases:

-Illusion of control: overestimate control over situation

-Planning fallacy: underestimate time needed for things

-Comparative optimism/pessimism: e.g.: overestimate likelihood being struck by lightning

-Pessimism about the future

There seems to be no effect of individual differences for the biases about over and underestimation

Moderators of overestimation

-Controllability

-Observability (e.g.: friendliness is easier to observe than honesty)

-Personal experience with absence of negative outcome (e.g.: smoking for years and still no lung problems --> it’s ok)

Difficult decision making: conflict at the workspace

Negative effects of workplace conflict: stress, burn-out, lower commitment, less innovation, higher turnover etc

Lack of conflict--> groupthink – e.g.: bay of Pigs – US invasion of Cuba, people didn’t speak up when planning

For good decision making we do need conflict to prevent groupthink, enhance creative thinking etc. However, it takes up a lot of energy, time, reduces satisfaction

Jehn – 3 types of intragroup conflict

Task conflict: disagreement among group members about the content and outcomes of the task being performed

Relationship conflict: Disagreement about interpersonal issues

Process conflict: disagreement about logistics

Are process conflicts bad for team performance

Process and relationship conflicts are bad for performance but not task conflict

Task conflict can be good for performance as long as there is no relationship conflict, but when they coexist then task conflict becomes negative

Conflict asymmetry: different perception of how much conflict there is

Why is asymmetry bad for group performance?

-Lack of shared mental models

-Impoverished information exchange

-Negative affect such as frustration and anger

-Negative cognitive effects: uncertainty, confusion, distraction

Beware of faultlines: e.g.: subgroup 1 are low-conflict pereceivers (LCP), and subgroup 2 are high conflict perceivers (HCP). Solution: subgroup 1 has both LCP and HCP perceivers, and so does subgroup 2.