We consistently find that people are more likely to agree with the statement, “I get the best outcome when we both behave cooperatively” than they are with “I get my best outcome when I behave competitively and they behave cooperatively.” But we still have about 15% who say that they get the best outcome when they exploit the other person’s cooperation unilaterally, and those 15% are driving a lot of the friction and conflict we see in organizations. In our longitudinal study, people who said “I get the best outcome by exploiting my counterpart” experienced the highest level of abusive supervision, hostility in the workplace, and workplace ostracism. That raises the chicken-and-egg question: Maybe they have that attitude because they’re in a horribly hostile environment. We actually find that.
Author: Nir Halevy
Source: Stanford University
Subjects: Negotiation, Organizational Behavior
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