The Development of an Intragroup Norm and the Effects of Interpersonal and Structural Challenges

Abstract

Portions of this paper were written while the second author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. We are grateful for the financial support provided by the National Science Foundation (#BNS87-00864 and SES88-15566) and the Russell Sage Foundation. The authors thank Max Bazerman, Connie Gersick, Marya Leatherwood, Huseyin Leblebici, Greg Oldham, three anonymous reviewers, and especially Gerald Salancik for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. Portions of this paper were presented at the 1988 National Academy of Management Meetings in Anaheim, CA. This study manipulated the norm-formation process and investigated how members of new groups respond to challenges to their newly developed norm. Bargaining pairs composed of individuals who each had repeated cooperative experiences formed implicit cooperative norms, expecting cooperation and acting cooperatively in a subsequent, similar task. Alternatively, pairs with repeated competitive experiences formed competitive norms for the same tasks. Some pairs' norms were challenged interpersonally when the members of a new pair had opposite prior experiences but needed to take joint action. Pairs were also challenged structurally, when the new task altered their incentives for cooperation. The study not only manipulated different norms in the same task, but its results indicate that interpersonal challenges are more successful when they are cooperative; structural challenges are more successful when they are strong and competitive.'