Search results

Wow! It was about this time of year – but about sixteen years ago – that we held our first Research on Managing Groups and Teams conference. The first one was held at Stanford but we moved the location between the East and West coasts for 14 years. As homage to where we met and as the touchstone to where so many of the participants in our conferences and the authors in our volumes were trained, taught, or visited, we returned to the Kellogg School of Management, our intellectual spawning ground. With generous and facilitating support from the Kellogg dean Sally Blount (who, not coincidentally, was the thematic editor of the RMGT Volume 5: Time in Groups), about 60 of us convened to present our ideas, engage in good-natured roasting of our colleagues, and remember how we and the field had changed – and the part that we all have played in that transformation. When Beta and I said our last good-byes at the conference, we left Evanston, not with sadness at the ending of the conferences, but with a sense of accomplishment and collegiality. We have watched young assistant professors transform into leaders in the field. We had seen our own research fortunes, responsibilities, and accomplishments ebb and flow over the 16 years. And now – we move on to new adventures, new horizons, and, with luck, a few more successes.

This study uses Hall's (1976) theory of low/high context culture with theories of interpersonal adaptation (Gudykunst, 1985; Patterson, 1983) to test communication preferences, flexibility, and effectiveness in same‐ and mixed‐culture negotiation. Ninety‐three same‐culture low context (Israel, Germany, Sweden, and U.S.), 101 same‐culture high context (Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Thailand), and 48 mixed‐culture mixed context (U.S.‐Japan, U.S.‐Hong Kong) dyads negotiated a 1 ½ hour simulation. Transcripts were content coded for direct and indirect integrative sequences and analyzed with hierarchical linear regression. Supporting the theory, results revealed more indirect integrative sequences in high context dyads and more direct integrative sequences in low context and mixed context dyads. Direct integrative sequences predicted joint gains for mixed context dyads.

The purpose of this study is to increase understanding about vertical coopetition from the perspective of interrelated conflict episodes on multiple levels.

The empirical part is based on a qualitative single case study of a coopetitive buyer-supplier relationship in the manufacturing sector.

Conflicts in vertical coopetition evolve from being merely functional and task-related to becoming dysfunctional and relationship-related, as the level of competition increases. The nature of conflict episodes influences the development of vertical coopetition, and therefore, the interrelatedness of conflict episodes is important to acknowledge.

Although a conflict is considered functional within a company, it may still be dysfunctional as far as the coopetitive relationship with the buyer or seller is concerned. Competition may trigger conflicts related to protecting own technology and knowledge, which may lead to termination of the cooperation, therefore coopetition should be managed in a way that balance sharing and protecting important knowledge to get advantages of coopetition.

The findings enhance prior research on vertical coopetition by offering new perspectives on causes of conflicts, their management, outcomes and types. The value of taking a multilevel approach lies in the ability to show how conflicts occur and influence other conflicts through the interrelatedness of conflict elements on different levels.

The field of Human Resource Management (HRM) has long recognized the importance of interpersonal influence for employee and organizational effectiveness. HRM research and practice have focused primarily on individuals’ characteristics and behaviors as a means to understand “who” is influential in organizations, with substantially less attention paid to social networks. To reinvigorate a focus on network structures to explain interpersonal influence, the authors present a comprehensive account of how network structures enable and constrain influence within organizations. The authors begin by describing how power and status, two key determinants of individual influence in organizations, operate through different mechanisms, and delineate a range of network positions that yield power, reflect status, and/or capture realized influence. Then, the authors extend initial structural views of influence beyond the positions of individuals to consider how network structures within and between groups – capturing group social capital and/or shared leadership – enable and constrain groups’ ability to influence group members, other groups, and the broader organizational system. The authors also discuss how HRM may leverage these insights to facilitate interpersonal influence in ways that support individual, group, and organizational effectiveness.

This study examines the association between the use of strategic management accounting (SMA) practices and competitive advantage and the moderating role of four aspects of organisational culture – teamwork orientation, outcome orientation, innovation orientation and attention to detail orientation – on this association. Online survey data were collected from 408 accountants in Australian business organisations, and structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to analyse the data. The results indicate a positive association between the use of SMA practices and competitive advantage with such an association positively moderated by one cultural dimension, teamwork orientation. Specifically, the findings indicate that the positive effect of SMA practices on competitive advantage is dependent upon the fit between the use of SMA practices and teamwork orientation with more (less) teamwork-oriented organisations exhibiting a stronger (weaker) association between the use of SMA practices and competitive advantage.

This paper aims to identify whether emotional intelligence relates to counterpart outcome satisfaction in negotiation contexts.

A negotiation simulation and a pre‐established measure of emotional intelligence were employed.

In Study 1, multi‐level models revealed that a participant's ability to understand emotion positively predicted his or her counterpart's outcome satisfaction. Study 2 replicates and extends this finding by showing the counterpart's outcome satisfaction, assessment of liking, and desire to negotiate again with the participant.

The mechanisms identifying how participants with high levels of understanding emotion induced their counterparts with positive affect were not examined.

This is the first empirical article to show a relationship between emotional intelligence and counterpart outcome satisfaction in a negotiation context.

Using a multi‐method approach, this paper presents both a qualitative and quantitative examination of workplace conflict, the emotional reactions to bullying and counterproductive behaviors. Three studies were undertaken for the present research. Data for Study 1 emerged from semi‐structured interviews conducted with 50 group leaders and members from six workgroups in two large organizations. Interviews were transcribed and analyzed using systematic interpretative techniques. Findings from Study 1 showed that conflict induced a variety of emotional and behavioral responses. Data from Study 2 were collected from 660 employees from 7 public sector organizations using a structured open‐ended survey. Results from Study 2 revealed that the majority of respondents perceived their managers as bullies. Study 3 surveyed 510 staff in 122 workgroups from five organizations. Regression analysis revealed that differing conflict events were associated with bullying, emotional reactions and counterproductive behaviors. In particular, prolonged conflict increased incidents of bullying. Higher levels of bullying were predictive of workplace counterproductive behaviors such as purposely wasting company material and supplies, purposely doing one's work incorrectly and purposely damaging a valuable piece of property belonging to the employer.

This experiment examined the effects of motivational orientation (prosocial versus egoistic) on interpersonal trust, negotiation behavior, amount of impasses, and joint outcomes in three‐person negotiations. Students participated in a joint venture negotiation, in which motivational orientation was manipulated by allocating individual incentives (egoistic motive) vs. team incentives (prosocial motive). Results indicated that prosocially motivated negotiators achieved more integrative agreements and fewer impasses, and reported higher trust, more problem solving, and less contending behavior than egoistically motivated negotiators. Hierarchical regression suggested that the finding that prosocial groups achieved higher joint outcomes can be explained by higher levels of trust, more problem solving behavior, and less contending behavior in prosocial groups.

This study aims to examine supervisors’ power preference (harsh/soft) for gaining compliance from subordinates in conflict situations using the updated Power Interaction Model (Koslowsky and Schwarzwald, 2009. The model assumes that the relationship between antecedents and power preference is mediated by cost/benefit considerations.

Four considerations were examined as mediators: acquiescence, relations, worker growth and conformity. A sample of 120 bank managers was given one of several conflict scenarios differing on severity (low/high) and subordinate worker’s performance ability (low/average/high). In addition, mangers’ leadership style and organizational commitment were assessed.

For the two manipulated variables, conflict (high significance, low significance) and worker performance (high, average, low), an interaction effect was tested with follow-up univariate analysis yielding significance only for harsh tactics. Structural equations modeling, used for comparing the fit generated for different mediators, indicated that acquiescence was the most salient mediator and provided adequate fit for the model predicting power tactics preference.

Although it is difficult to exclude cultural effects when applying the Interpersonal Power Interaction Model (IPIM) in a specific country, it should be noted that, as far as factor structure is concerned, a similar pattern was obtained for Israeli and American participants in previous research (Raven et al., 1998). Additionally, in the present study, the outcome measure was not observed but rather elicited through scenarios. The participant responses were derived from self-report questionnaires and are prone to percept–percept bias and common method variance.

For the first time, in a study where antecedent variables were manipulated, findings supported the revised IPIM. Power choice was demonstrated as a result of a sequential process with mediators serving as links between various organizational, situational and personal antecedents and outcomes.

The very first issue of the Research on Managing Groups and Teams volume in 1998 was on the topic of Group Composition. As an inaugural topic that choice reflected the importance of the issue of composition in the study of groups and in the changing American and global landscape. Now, 10 years later, the topic of the volume, Diversity and Groups, has emerged again at an opportune time in the research, managerial, and societal dialogue on this issue. One of my very first publications was a chapter in that inaugural issue of Research on Managing Groups and Teams with Charles O’Reilly and Sigal Barsade titled “Group Demography and Innovation: Does Diversity Help?” So as you can see, this topic is one that has been central to my own research agenda since its inception. When Maggie and Beta asked me to be the volume editor for this issue on Diversity and Groups I was excited to have the opportunity to bring together an interdisciplinary set of scholars thinking about the questions of when, why, how, and for what theoretical reasons does diversity affect individual and group functioning.