Letter from the Editor-in-Chief, NCMR (May 2021)
Letter from the Editor-in-Chief, NCMR
May 2021
Dear IACM Members,
I hope this letter finds you and your family safe and healthy.
Qi Wang, NCMR EIC
This is an extraordinary year, with unprecedented challenges, newfound gratefulness, and reinforced support from our communities. My school is approaching the end of the academic year 2020-2021, and I look forward to the summer break to rest, recharge, and get ready to go back to normal from next academic year. I hope wherever you are, you are ready to renew and recuperate as well.
Despite the challenges, NCMR has been thriving. Thanks to our authors, reviewers, and readers, NCMR continues publishing rigorous, ethical, and impactful research on negotiation and conflict, especially research that reflects interdisciplinary and international collaborations. For examples, please check out the upcoming issue, 14(2), a brief description of which is included at the end of this letter. Please expect more detailed information in the Editor’s annual report at the upcoming IACM conference in July.
Three other pieces of important news regarding NCMR are as follows (I’ll be brief here because Taya Cohen and Jennifer Parlamis provide more details in their columns). First, as Taya Cohen indicated in the President’s column, IACM is collaborating with the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School in building up the Negotiation Data Repository. NCMR encourages authors to submit their research materials and data to support IACM’s commitment to open science. Second, Jen Parlamis and Ming-Hong Tsai have started an NCMR Article to Audio Podcast. Each episode features an interview with the author(s), and includes the published article highlights as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the research process. In the first episode, Jen and Ming did an amazing job interviewing Innocentina-Marie O. Obi, Katalien Bollen, Hillie Aaldering, Wouter Robijn, and Martin C. Euwema, who discussed their article, Servant Leadership, Third-Party Behavior, and Emotional Exhaustion of Followers, and their research process. A big shout out to our authors and interviewers, as well as to the supporting team members: Deborah Cai, Michael Gross, and Laura Rees. Please find the link at our SoundCloud page.
Last but not least, I’d like to thank our NCMR Award Committee, Lan Ni, Bing Han, and Laura Rees, for their hard work. The WINNERS of 2021 Best Article Award for an Article Published at NCMR in 2020 are Dale Hample and Jessica Marie Hample. Congratulations!
Hample, D. & Hample, J. M. (2020). There is no away: Where do people go when they avoid an interpersonal conflict? Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 13(4), 304-325. https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12170
Two very finely written articles made to the finalists list. Congratulations to these authors too:
Friedman, R. A., Pinkley, R. L., Bottom, W. P., Liu, W., & Gelfand, M. (2020). Implicit theories of negotiation: Developing a measure of agreement fluidity. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 13(2), 127-150. https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12166
Eddington, S. M., Corple, D., Buzzanell, P. M., Zoltowski, C., & Brightman, A. (2020). Addressing organizational cultural conflicts in engineering with design thinking. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 13(3), 263-284. https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12191
As usual, please feel free to email me at ncmr@villanova.edu for any questions, thoughts, proposals, etc. Below please find the four exciting articles that will appear in Issue 14(2).
Peace and health,
Qi Wang,
Editor-in-Chief of NCMR
NCMR Issue 14(2)
May 2021
Article 1
Too Many Cooks Spoil the Broth: Toward a Theory for How the Tragedy of the Anticommons Emerges in Organizations
Matthew W. McCarter, Shirli Kopelman, Thomas A. Turk, Candace E. Ybarra
https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12174
Abstract
In organizations, conflict revolves around the use of shared resources. Research on property rights, territoriality, and social dilemmas suggests that to reduce such conflict, organizations could facilitate the psychological privatization of commons resources. We introduce a model that helps understand how psychologically privatizing organizational commons resources—to prevent the overuse problem of the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, G. Science, 162, 1968, 1243)—can lead to the emergence of another resource dilemma. We develop a model that illustrates how resource complexity and group complexity increase psychological marking and defending behaviors. These behaviors potentially lead to a problem of resource underuse—a tragedy of the anticommons (Heller, M. A. Harvard Law Review, 111, 1998, 621)—in organizational settings. The conceptual model, integrating insights from research on property rights, territoriality, and social dilemmas with law and social psychology, provides a bottom‐up behavioral explanation of the emergence of the tragedy of the anticommons in organizations and outlines opportunities for future research.
Author Bios
Matthew W. McCarter was an Associate Professor of Management at The University of Texas at San Antonio and a research affiliate at the Economic Science Institute at Chapman University. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois- Champaign Urbana in 2009. His primary research interest is managerial decision making with a particular interest in social dilemmas and collaboration problems in organizational settings. Matthew McCarter passed away in July of 2019.
Shirli Kopelman is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Kopelman was President of the International Association for Conflict Management in 2017 and also served as Faculty Director of Practice (2015) and of Research (2017) at the Center for Positive Organizations at the University of Michigan. Kopelman is author of Negotiating Genuinely: Being Yourself in Business published in 2014 by Stanford University Press. Kopelman’s research focuses on mindfully navigating emotions in negotiation and fostering cooperation in social dilemmas and multicultural group settings.
Thomas A. Turk serves as the Dean of Chapman University’s Argyros School of Business and Economics and is a Professor of Strategic Management. Professor Turk’s research has examined the role of executive incentives in strategic decision making and firm performance. Professor Turk’s current research and consulting assists firms in reducing bureaucracy and increasing their capacity to take entrepreneurial initiative.
Candace E. Ybarra serves as Associate Dean of Chapman University’s Argyros School of Business and Economics and is an Associate Professor of Strategic Management. Professor Ybarra’s research focuses on the use of strategic alliances to gain competitive advantages and improve performance. Specifically she examines factors that promote trust, flexibility and knowledge creation between partners.
Article 2
Using Emotions to Frame Issues and Identities in Conflict: Farmer Movements on Social Media
Tim M. Stevens, Noelle Aarts, Art Dewulf
https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12177
Abstract
Polarization and group formation processes on social media networks have received ample academic attention, but few studies have looked into the discursive interactions on social media through which intergroup conflicts develop. In this comparative case study, we analyzed two social media conflicts between farmers and animal right advocates to understand how conflicts establish, escalate, and return dormant through issue and identity framing and the discursive use of emotions. The results show that the two groups used the same set of frames throughout the three phases. We identify this as a symmetric conflict framing repertoire. The groups both use a dominant moral frame (animal welfare is of absolute value), but express distinct views on policy solutions. This triggers a contestation of credibility (who knows best and who cares most for animals) in which the two groups use the same set of issue and identity frames to directly oppose each other. The binary opposition is initially established through issue framing but escalates into an identity conflict that involves group labeling and blaming. The discursive use of emotion reinforces this escalation in two ways. First, it reinforces a vicious cycle in the contestation of credibility: While emotions are implicitly used to frame oneself as caring and trustworthy, emotion is explicitly used to frame the other party as deceptive and irrational. Second, disputants use collective emotions as a response to the other group’s offensive actions (blaming) and as a justification of one’s own collective actions. We discuss how this conflict differs from previously studied conflicts to provide plausible explanations for these findings.
Author Bios
Tim M. Stevens is an interdisciplinary scientist with expertise in digital media research, working at Communication, Philosophy and Technology (CPT), Wageningen University & Research. He studies the interactions between social media activity and stakeholders’ communication and policy practices in the domains: agriculture, food & health, and nature & environment. For his PhD on Social Media Dynamics in Argo-Food Governance, he combined computational methods on macro-level (e.g. semantic and social network analysis) with interpretive methods on micro-level (e.g. framing and policy analyses).
Noelle Aarts is professor Socio-Ecological Interactions at the Institute for Science in Society (ISiS) at the Radboud University In Nijmegen. Focusing on conversations between people, she studies inter-human processes and communication for creating space for sustainable change. She has published on several topics such as frame construction in interaction about life science issues, conflict and negotiation in the domain of nature policies and land use planning, dealing with ambiguity, dilemmas and ambivalence, network-building and self-organization for regional innovation and multi-functional landuse and on dialogue between people who fundamentally differ. Noelle Aarts is one of the directors of the ’Centrum voor Dialogue’ (CVD).
Art Dewulf is professor of sensemaking and decision-making in policy processes at the Public Administration and Policy group, Wageningen University & Research. He studies complex problems of natural resource governance with a focus on interactive processes of sensemaking and decision-making in water and climate governance.
Article 3
When Asking “What” and “How” Helps You Win: Mimicry of Interrogative Terms Facilitates Successful Online Negotiations
Kate Muir, Adam Joinson, Emily Collins, Rachel Cotterill, Nigel Dewdney
https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12179
Abstract
Strategic word mimicry during negotiations facilitates better outcomes. We explore mimicry of specific word categories and perceptions of rapport, trust, and liking as underlying mechanisms. Dyads took part in an online negotiation exercise in which word mimicry was manipulated: Participants were instructed to mimic each other’s words (both‐mimic), one participant mimicked the other (half‐mimic), or neither participant mimicked (neither‐mimic). When given a simple instruction to mimic their partner, participants mimicked both the style (personal pronouns, adverbs, linguistic style, interrogative terms) and the content (affiliation terms, power terms, and assents) of their partner’s messages. Mimicry was associated with greater joint and individual points gain and perceptions of rapport from the mimicked partner. Further, mimicry of interrogative terms (e.g., how, why) mediated positive effects of mimicry upon negotiation outcomes, suggesting the coordination of question asking between negotiators is an important strategy to create beneficial interactions and add value in negotiations.
Author Bios
Kate Muir, is a Lecturer in Forensic Psychology at Bath Spa University. Her research concerns interpersonal communication, and how interacting with others impacts on various elements of cognition and social relationships.
Adam Joinson, is Professor of Information Systems at the University of Bath. He works on behaviour and technology, with a foci on social behaviour and cybersecurity.
Emily Collins, is a Lecturer in Human Factors at Cardiff University. Her research takes an interdisciplinary, mixed methods approach, exploring the use and design of technology for positive outcomes in the context of work life balance, well-being and cyber security.
Rachel Cotterill, completed her PhD in natural language processing, with an emphasis on stylometry and social power. She has research interests in applying computational techniques to the intersections of linguistics and social dynamics.
Nigel Dewdney, completed his PhD in computer science, looking at methods for detecting novel propositions made in social media, and has interests in linguistic influences, dialogue analysis, and language modelling.
Article 4
When there is No ZOPA: Mental Fatigue, Integrative Complexity, and Creative Agreement in Negotiations
Jingjing Yao, Zhi‐Xue Zhang, Leigh Anne Liu
https://doi.org/10.1111/ncmr.12178
Abstract
How to reach a creative agreement in negotiations when the Zone of Possible Agreement (ZOPA) does not apparently exist? To answer this question, we drew on the cognitive flexibility theory and proposed a model predicting that negotiators’ mental fatigue would engender fewer creative agreements, and their integrative complexity acted as an underlying mechanism. Across four studies, we measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Studies 2–4) mental fatigue to test our hypotheses. We found that negotiation dyads with higher mental fatigue were less likely to display integrative complexity and hence less likely to reach creative agreements in negotiations without an apparent ZOPA. We also demonstrated that in this kind of negotiation, simply identifying additional issues or proposing packaging offers were not enough; negotiators need to do both to construct creative agreements. This research contributes to the literature of negotiation, creative problem‐solving, and the cognitive flexibility theory.
Author Bios
Jingjing Yao is an Assistant Professor of International Negotiations at IESEG School of Management. He received his Ph.D. in Organization Management from Peking University. His research interests include negotiation, trust, and cross-cultural studies. His research findings have appeared in journals such as Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Negotiation Journal. He currently serves as an associate editor in the Group Decision and Negotiation journal and the representative-at-large for International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR).
Zhi-Xue Zhang is a Professor of organization and Strategic management, and the director of Center for Research in Behavioral Science at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He received his PhD from University of Hong Kong. He is currently the president-elect of the International Association for Chinese Management Research (IACMR). Professor Zhang’s research interests include business leadership, team process, negotiation, conflict management, and cross-cultural management.
Leigh Anne Liu is a Professor of International Business at Georgia State University and the FulbrightHanken Distinguished Chair of Business and Economics 2020-2021. She received her PhD from Vanderbilt University. Her research explores culture, cognition, and identity in intercultural interactions at the individual, organization, and country levels.