Conflict, group strategies, merger and reorganization

Solution Preview

See attached file.

Question 1 of 4:
Research strategies for moving parties away from egocentric perceptions of conflict and toward more mutually-held perceptions.

Epley and Caruso (2004) observed that people see the world through their own eyes, experience it through their own senses. This means that one's own perspective on the world is directly experienced, whereas, others' perspectives must be inferred. Because experience is more efficient than inference, people automatically interpret objects and events egocentrically and only subsequently correct or adjust that interpretation when necessary.

One possible explanation for these egocentric biases is that individuals generally hold (or are motivated to hold) positive views of themselves (Brown, 1986; Taylor, 1989; Taylor & Brown, 1988). People tend to believe they are more rational, healthy, honest, and cooperative than the average person-and feel the same about almost any desirable trait.

Epley and Caruso had this experiment:

"We tested these potentially deleterious effects in one experiment on MBA student study groups and in another experiment on author groups of academic journal publications (Caruso, Epley, & Bazerman, 2004). Among both groups, inducing individuals to think about their collaborators was successful at reducing egocentric judgments of responsibility. That is, those led to think about the contributions of each of their other group members reported doing less work than those who only reported their own efforts. However, the high credit-claimers who engaged in perspective taking actually reported being less satisfied with the group and less likely to want to work with the group in the future, whereas low credit-claimers showed the opposite pattern. No relationship was found between the amount of claiming and satisfaction or interest in future collaboration for those who did not engage in perspective taking."

What the experts suggest:

1. Egocentric biases in social judgment can be reduced by actively adopting another's perspective, but that less self-serving behavior does not follow as an obvious result across all contexts. Faced with the heightened accessibility of the contributions and entitlements of other parties, people's overall judgments should reflect less self-serving attitudes compared to a group that has not considered the situation from another's point of view. However, the same process of perspective taking may give rise to cynical theories about the likely behavior ...