Managing group behavior: The interplay between procedural justice, sense of self, and cooperation

Within groups, organizations, and societies, people have their own goals and behaviors that do not always align well with the aims of the higher collective, and as such constituting a mixed-motive situation. A consequence of this conflict in motives is that people do not always consider the collective welfare, the obligation to follow rules, acts of voluntarism-which can all be classified as acts of cooperation-to be important to their own values, motives, and self-definitions. In other words, cooperation is often thought of as conflicting with people's views of their own self-interest. Thus, for social psychologists the important question becomes understanding how cooperation with others can be viewed by people as self-relevant and self-motivating and creating conditions under which people will more easily internalize the value and importance of cooperative acts. Earlier research mainly focused on the effects of punishment and rewards to increase the attractiveness of cooperation. For example, studies have shown that cooperation increases if the payoff for the cooperative choice becomes more attractive and the payoff for the defecting choice less attractive (see Van Lange, Liebrand, Messick, & Wilke, 1992). Despite the fact that such monitoring and sanctioning systems may work to some extent, the potential side-effects are that they undermine intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000). As a consequence, once such instrumental (or self-interest based) incentives are removed, the level of cooperation is likely to drop again and will fall to even lower levels if intrinsic motivation has been undermined (Mulder, van Dijk, De Cremer, & Wilke, 2003). Thus, sanctioning or monitoring systems targeted at individuals' self-interest do not motivate people to value cooperation for intrinsic reasons. As a result, their use commits a group to a never-ending need to have available the resources to reward desirable behavior and to create and maintain a credible sanctioning system that will discourage rule breaking through the provision of sanctions. These mechanisms are costly and inefficient and constitute a constant drag on the ability of groups to deploy their resources in ways that are most adaptive for the group.