MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONS
Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management & Organizations
Executive Director of the Center for Executive Women
Victoria Medvec is the Adeline Barry Davee Professor of Management & Organizations and Executive Director of the Center for Executive Women. Professor Medvec joined the Kellogg School's faculty in 1995. Her research focuses on judgment and decision making, with a particular emphasis on how people feel about the decisions they have made. Her current research explores both independent decision making and interdependent decisions within the context of negotiations. Her work is published in academic journals such as Psychological Review, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Organization Behavior and Human Decision Processes. In addition, her research has been highlighted in numerous popular media outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Today Show.
Professor Medvec teaches in many executive programs, both at the Kellogg School’s Allen Center and in numerous individual companies. Her consulting and teaching activities bring her in touch with executives from around the world. Her outside clients include General Electric, Merck, McKinsey, Hearst Communications, Exelon, Abbott Labs, Ernst and Young, Booz Allen and Hamilton, Everett Smith Group, Deloitte and Touche, Kaiser Permanente, Baker & McKenzie, Redi-Cut Foods, Guidant Corporation, ZS Associates, Motorola, Business Objects, PCA, United Healthcare, Exelon, Akzo Nobel, Foote Cone and Belding, Guaranty Bank, Scottish Power, Novartis, and Mattel.
Corporate Governance
Diversity
Group Decision-Making
Group Dynamics
Leadership
Negotiations
Psychology
Teams
Women in Management
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This research explores the impact of dyadic communication opportunities on group norms. We propose a link between dyadic communication and group norms such that the absence of dyadic communication enhances a norm of group unity whereas its presence enhances a norm of faction-forming. In two studies, we demonstrate that the presence of dyadic communication opportunities can both help and hurt group performance and that this depends on a fit between the content of the norm and the wider social context. In competitive negotiation tasks that benefit from group unity, the absence of dyadic communication results in a stronger focus on the group and its future as well as increased group performance. However, in problem solving tasks that benefit from faction-forming, the mere presence of dyadic communication opportunities leads to an increased openness to unique information, disagreement, and group performance. Implications for how to effectively manage technologies that create opportunities for dyadic communication during group discussions are considered.
The article reports on multiple equivalent simultaneous offers, or MESOs. Presenting more than one offer at a time increases the alliance's satisfaction as well as the odds that an agreement will be implemented. The term meso means combining form and middle in Greek, suggesting a balance between states; true to this connotation, MESOs allow both a profitable agreement and a positive interpersonal climate. Making MESOs requires that we create a scoring system that allows us to compare qualitatively different issues. For a job candidate preparing to present MESOs to a prospective employer, these might include compensation, location, and vacation days. MESOs allow you to secure an understanding of the other side's interests that we would be unlikely to ascertain through direct questioning. Through MESOs, we can detect whether one might be misrepresenting his perspective or inadvertently overstating his position. MESOs are an effective strategy at the beginning, middle, and end of the negotiation, allowing us to constantly anchor, learn, detect, persist, and reframe.
The authors examined whether negotiators are prone to an illusion of transparency or the belief that their private thoughts and feelings are more discernible to their negotiation partners than they actually are. In Study One, negotiators who were trying to conceal their preferences thought that their preferences had leaked out more than they actually did. In Study Two, experienced negotiators who were trying to convey information about some of their preferences overestimated their partners' ability to discern them. The results of Study Three rule out the possibility that the findings are simply the result of the curse of knowledge, or the projection of one's own knowledge onto others. Discussion explores how the illusion of transparency might impede negotiators' success.
Different interpretations of an apparent temporal pattern to the experience of regret were addressed through joint research. T. Gilovich and V. H. Medvec (1995a) argued that people regret actions more in the short term and inactions more in the long run because the sting of regrettable action diminishes relatively quickly, whereas the pain of regrettable inaction lingers longer. D. Kahneman (1995) disagreed, arguing that people's long-term regrets of inaction are largely wistful and therefore not terribly troublesome. Three studies that examined the emotional profile of action and inaction regrets established considerable common ground. Action regrets were found to elicit primarily "hot" emotions (e.g., anger), and inaction regrets were found to elicit both feelings of wistfulness (e.g., nostalgia) and despair (e.g., misery). Thus, some inaction regrets are indeed wistful (as Kahneman argued), whereas others are troublesome (as Gilovich and Medvec maintained).
Confidence has been found to vary with temporal proximity to an upcoming task: People's confidence that they will do well tends to diminish as the "moment of truth" draws near. We propose that this phenomenon stems in part from individuals using their pretask arousal as a cue to their level of confidence. Arousal that is part and parcel of "gearing up" to perform a task may be misattributed to diminished confidence. Consistent with this reasoning, participants in two experiments who were encouraged to misattribute their arousal to a neutral source ("subliminal noise") expressed greater confidence in their ability than did participants not able to do so-a result that would not be obtained if arousal was simply a reflection, and not a cause, of diminished confidence.
During a decision might a preexisting preference lead to the distortion of new information in favor of the preferred alternative? An experiment that furnished one alternative with a prior preference found such predecisional distortion. It was also found that in the absence of any initial preference, a developing preference for one alternative led to the distortion of new information so as to favor that leading alternative. The distortion from both sources, preexisting and developing preferences, exceeded the postdecisional distortion from cognitive dissonance reduction.
Do people reduce dissonance more for their errors of commission than their errors of omission? More specifically, do people come to value a disappointing outcome obtained through a direct action more than an identical outcome obtained through a failure to act? To answer this question, the authors created a laboratory analogue of the "three doors" or "Monty Hall" problem. Subjects initially selected one box from a group of three, only one of which contained a "grand" prize. After the experimenter opened one of the two unchosen boxes and revealed a modest prize, subjects were asked to decide whether to stay with their initial selection or trade it in for the other unopened box. Regardless of the subject's choice, a modest prize was received. Results indicated that subjects who switched boxes assigned a higher monetary value to the modest prize they received than those who stayed with their initial choice. Implications for the psychology of regret are discussed.
There is a mix of advice concerning the role of emotion in negotiation. Both the prescriptive and descriptive negotiation literatures toil with the questions of whether it is advisable to be emotional in a negotiation, whether one should play on other's emotions, and whether it is better to display positive or negative emotions throughout a negotiation. Our review of the research literature identifies three distinct perspectives on the role of emotion at the bargaining table. These perspectives, which we label the rational negotiator, the positive negotiator, and the irrational negotiator, give rise to very different prescriptive advice. First, we review these three perspectives on emotion and critically examine the prescriptive advice that flows from each of these perspectives. Subsequently, we expose the assumptions and biases that underlie this advice. Finally, we suggest directions for future research.
This course counts toward the following majors: Management & Organizations.
This course provides students with the social science tools needed to solve organizational problems and influence the actions of individuals, groups and organizations. It prepares managers to understand how to best organize and motivate the human capital of the firm, manage social networks and alliances, and execute strategic change. This is accomplished through knowledge of competitive decision making, reward system design, team building, strategic negotiation, political dynamics, corporate culture and strategic organizational design.
Negotiations (MORS-470-0)
This course counts toward the following majors: Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Management & Organizations.
This course is designed to improve students' skills in all phases of negotiation: understanding prescriptive and descriptive negotiation theory as it applies to dyadic and multiparty negotiations, to buyer-seller transactions and the resolution of disputes, to the development of negotiation strategy and to the management of integrative and distributive aspects of the negotiation process. The course is based on a series of simulated negotiations in a variety of contexts including one-on-one, multi-party, cross-cultural, third-party and team negotiations. There is an attendance policy.
Prerequisite: MORS-430.
Negotiation Strategies teaches the art and science of achieving objectives in interdependent relationships, both inside and outside the company. Students practice cross-cultural negotiation, dispute resolution, coalition formation and multiparty negotiations, extremely competitive negotiations, and negotiating via information technology.
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