Autonomy-mediated Trust- Supportive autonomy for resolving disputes and fostering relationships in heterogenous teams
Abstract
With the rise of heterogenous teams - e.g., cross-functional, multinational, distributed, and teaming constellations - team decision-making requires compromise between members representing groups that differ not only in their interests, but also in their values, norms and identities. In promoting their own group s interests, teammates must simultaneously negotiate their relationships and identity within the team and within the group they represent. Teammates may feel unsafe sharing ideas or challenging their teammates and thus reach poor agreements, due to perceived threats to these relationships. Yet trusting relationships can also serve as a positive source of value- trading off immediate material value to strengthen relationships can yield long-term material rewards. Such observations have led dispute-resolution research to focus on the role of relationships in shaping the resolution of disputes, and how in turn, the resolution of disputes shapes relationships between team members and between members and the groups they represent. In this proposal, we incorporate theories of relationships into the design of automated dispute resolution methods with the aim of enhancing the performance of heterogeneous teams. Research in automated dispute resolution illustrates that autonomy can help parties discover mutually-beneficial agreements over material issues, but these systems ignore the less tangible but very real value parties derive from relationships. Traditional systems first elicit preferences from each member of the dispute (helping them identify and quantify their preferences, but more importantly, helping explore tradeoffs between different sources of material value), then suggest non-binding agreements that benefit all parties. Though these methods have achieved some commercial success (e.g., www.smartsettle.com), by focusing only on material concerns, they can undermine parties trust in each other, the negotiated settlement and the dispute resolution autonomy itself.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 06, 2024
- Source ID
- FA95502310320
Entities
People
- Jonathan Gratch
Organizations
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research
- United States Air Force
- University of Southern California