Mental Models at Work: Cognitive Causes and Consequences of Conflict in Organizations

This research investigated the reciprocal relationship among mental models of conflict and various forms of dysfunctional social relations in organizations, including experiences of task and relationship conflicts, interpersonal hostility, workplace ostracism, and abusive supervision. We conceptualize individual differences in conflict construals as reflecting variation in people’s belief structures about conflict, and explore how different elements in people’s associative networks – in particular, their beliefs about their best and worst strategy in conflict – relate to their personality, shape their experiences of workplace conflict, and influence others’ behavioral intentions toward them. Five studies using a variety of methods (including crosssectional surveys, a 12-week longitudinal diary study, and an experiment), show that best strategy beliefs relate in theoretically meaningful ways to individuals’ personality; shape social interactions and relationships significantly more than worst strategy beliefs; and are updated over time as a result of individuals’ ongoing experiences of conflict

“Ingroup Love" and “Outgroup Hate" as Motives for Individual Participation in Intergroup Conflict: A New Game Paradigm

What motivates individual self-sacrificial behavior in intergroup conflicts? Is it the altruistic desire to help the ingroup or the aggressive drive to hurt the outgroup? This paper introduces a new game paradigm, the Intergroup Prisoner’s Dilemma – Maximizing Difference (IPD-MD) game, designed specifically to distinguish between these two motives. The game involves two groups. Each group member is given a monetary endowment and can decide how much of it to contribute. Contribution can be made to either of two pools, one which benefits the ingroup at a personal cost, and another which, in addition, harms the outgroup. An experiment demonstrated that contributions in the IPD-MD game are made almost exclusively to the cooperative within-group pool. Moreover, pre-play intragroup communication increases intragroup cooperation but not intergroup competition. These results are compared with those observed in the Intergroup Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) game, where group members' contributions are restricted to the competitive between-group pool.

Cathodoluminescence of iron oxides and oxyhydroxides

Iron oxides and oxyhydroxides show promise as superconductor materials and as repositories of paleo-environmental information. However, there are no microscale non-destructive analytical techniques to characterize their combined mineralogy, chemical composition, and crystal properties. We address this by developing cathodoluminescence mounted on a scanning electron microscope (SEM-CL) as an in situ, non-destructive method for the crystallographic and petrographic study of iron oxides and oxyhydroxides. We show that goethite, hematite, and magnetite display different SEM-CL spectra, which may be used for mineral identification. We further show that different formation pH, manganese substitution for iron in goethite and hematite, and titanium substitution for iron in magnetite cause shifts in the SEM-CL spectra of these minerals. These spectral shifts are not always detectable as a change in the emission color but are easily discernable by quantitative analysis of the spectra. Together with subtle but observable variations in the SEM-CL spectra of natural goethite and hematite, we suggest that these dependences of the SEM-CL spectra on pH and chemical composition may be used as a means of identifying multiple episodes of mineralization and recrystallization. We apply the newly developed SEM-CL methods to two polished sections of natural samples and show that quantitative analysis of the spectra obtained allows the identification of differences between varieties of the same mineral that are not observable by other means. Like the application of SEM-CL to geologic samples in this study, we suggest that this approach may be used to explore the in situ chemistry and crystallinity of various natural and manufactured iron oxides and oxyhydroxides.ISSN:0003-004XISSN:1945-302