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AbstractEthnographic research offers an alternative approach which can provide insights into the types of complex situations that negotiators really face. This approach is not easy – it can be more time consuming, costly, and difficult than other research methods – but the payoff comes from the way these in-depth studies challenge scholars to develop new ideas and theories, based on what really happens in negotiations rather than on the logical next step in a series of experiments.

As companies look for better ways to manage diversity, one of the approaches that is emerging is the use of female and minority network groups. These groups are not well understood, and there has been no quantitative analysis of their impact on minority employees. Social network theory suggests that network groups should enhance the social resources available to women and minorities and in that way enhance their chance of career success, but some critics of network groups suggest that backlash might produce greater social isolation and discrimination. In this paper, we analyze a survey of members of the National Black MBA Association to find out whether network groups have a positive impact on career optimism, what specific effects of these groups are most beneficial, and whether groups enhance isolation or discrimination. Results indicate that network groups have a positive overall impact on career optimism of Black managers, and that this occurs primarily via enhanced mentoring. Network groups have no effect on discrimination, either positive or negative. There are some indications of greater isolation, but also some indications of greater contact with Whites.

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to test how individuals' emotion reactions (fear vs anger) to expressed anger influence their intended conflict management styles. It investigates two interventions for managing their reactions: hot vs cold processing and enhancing conflict self-efficacy.Design/methodology/approachHypotheses were tested in two experiments using an online simulation. After receiving an angry or a neutral message from a coworker, participants either completed a cognitive processing task (E1) or a conflict self-efficacy task (E2), and then self-reported their emotions, behavioral activation/inhibition and intended conflict management styles.FindingsFear is associated with enhanced behavioral inhibition, which results in greater intentions to avoid and oblige and lower intentions to dominate. Anger is associated with enhanced behavioral activation, which results in greater intentions to integrate and dominate, as well as lower intentions to avoid and oblige. Cold (vs hot) processing does not reduce fear or reciprocal anger but increasing individuals' conflict self-efficacy does.Research limitations/implicationsThe studies measured intended reactions rather than behavior. The hot/cold manipulation effect was small, potentially limiting its ability to diminish emotional responses.Practical implicationsThese results suggest that increasing employees' conflict self-efficacy can be an effective intervention for helping them manage the natural fear and reciprocal anger responses when confronted by others expressing anger.Originality/valueEnhancing self-efficacy beliefs is more effective than cold processing (stepping back) for managing others' anger expressions. By reducing fear, enhanced self-efficacy diminishes unproductive responses (avoiding, obliging) to a conflict.

Research on self-serving bias in teams has focused on bias after teams receive feedback. Many teams, however, work for extended periods of time before receiving feedback. This article proposes that team members exhibit biases prior to receiving feedback, depending on the level of team satisfaction. The results of two studies, one scenario study and one field study, demonstrate that members of unsatisfied teams make more self-serving claims about their contribution toward the team's task. This bias, however, is eliminated in teams with strong psychological safety norms that make team members' contributions more salient to one another. A surprising result, in our sample of ongoing teams, was that the most highly satisfied teams also demonstrated an other-centric bias—assigning more credit to other team members than to themselves.

While the "formulation" or "strategy" side of business policy has always drawn appropriately from economic theory, we caution that, taken to its logical extreme, economic theory ignores the importance of implementation, implies lack of choice in organization decision-making, and makes the organization a nonentity. In this paper, we outline the fundamental differences between behavioral and economic approaches to business policy. These differences are highlighted by an illustration of their divergent perspectives on corporate "agency".

This research examines the dynamics of consensus building in intracultural and intercultural negotiations achieved through the convergence of mental models between negotiators. Working from a dynamic constructivist view, according to which the effects of culture are socially and contextually contingent, we theorize and show in two studies of U.S. and Chinese negotiators that while consensus might be generally easier to achieve in intracultural negotiation settings than intercultural settings, the effects of culture depend on the epistemic and social motives of the parties. As hypothesized, we find that movement toward consensus (in the form of mental model convergence) is more likely among intracultural than intercultural negotiating dyads and that negotiators' epistemic and social motives moderated these effects: need for closure inhibited consensus more for intercultural than intracultural dyads, while concern for face fostered consensus more for intercultural than intracultural dyads. Our theory and findings suggest that consensus building is not necessarily more challenging in cross-cultural negotiations but depends on the epistemic and social motivations of the individuals negotiating.

Behavioral integrity (BI)—a perception that a person acts in ways that are consistent with their words—has been shown to have an impact on many areas of work life. However, there have been few studies of BI in Eastern cultural contexts. Differences in communication style and the nature of hierarchical relationships suggest that spoken commitments are interpreted differently in the East and the West. We performed three scenario-based experiments that look at response to word–deed inconsistency in different cultures. The experiments show that Indians, Koreans, and Taiwanese do not as readily revise BI downward following a broken promise as do Americans (Study 1), that the U.S.–Indian difference is especially pronounced when the speaker is a boss rather than a subordinate (Study 2), and that people exposed to both cultures adjust perceptions of BI based on the cultural context of where the speaking occurs (Study 3).