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Purpose – We consider the question of when teams are an asset at the negotiating table and when they are a liability.

Methodology – We center our review on three key “empirical truths” about teams. First, teams are better than individuals at solving problems. Second, teams are more self-interested than individuals. Third, teams are trusted less and are less trusting than individuals.

Findings – Teams have an advantage over solo negotiators when there is unshared information and multiple issues on the table. Teams have an advantage in these contexts because of their superior problem-solving abilities. However, teams are more likely than solos to suffer from costly and uncertain legal action due to failures in dispute resolution and earn lower profits than solos in negotiations with a prisoner's dilemma structure. Thus, because teams are more self-interested and less trusted than individuals, they can be a liability in negotiations in which the parties' interests are opposed.

Implications – To the leverage the positive effects of teams in negotiation, it is critical that negotiators determine whether the context is one that allows for coordination and integrative tradeoffs, such as multi-issue deal-making negotiations, versus one that is characterized by noncorrespondent outcomes and incompatible interests, such as disputes and prisoner's dilemma interactions.

Value of the paper – The term “negotiation” has been applied rather broadly to a complex assortment of mixed-motive tasks. Our review indicates that distinguishing among these tasks is paramount to meaningfully address questions of individual versus group performance in negotiation.

The academic literature within social psychology focuses on describing what leaders and groups do wrong rather than what they do right. We refer to this as the “negative psychology” of leaders and groups. This chapter reviews the negative and positive research perspectives on leadership and groups. We propose that scholarly research makes more references to the shortcomings of leaders and groups rather than their successes. We conjecture that the pressure by the academic community to produce compelling counterintuitive research findings fuels the tendency to concentrate on failures. In contrast, we suggest that popular articles and books more often focus on the positive achievement of leaders and groups because their audience, namely managers, are more interested in learning how to achieve positive results than to avoid negative outcomes. Finally, we suggest that scholarly research on the psychology of leaders and groups could benefit from understanding how to achieve and maintain positive outcomes, whereas popular press may better prevent organizational failure and ruin by understanding managers’ blunders and faults.

In many organizational settings, status hierarchies result in the conferral of privileges that are based on achievement. However, in the same settings, status may result in the bestowal of privileges that are unearned. We argue that these unearned privileges are often awarded based on ascribed characteristics, but are perceived to be achieved. We further argue that these misattributions occur because acknowledging that one has benefited from unearned advantages that are awarded in a meritocracy can be threatening to a person's self-identity. We propose that by studying unearned privileges in organizational settings, a more accurate assessment of status hierarchies may result.