Geoffrey J Leonardelli

University of Toronto | U of T · Rotman School of Management

In reviewing self-categorization theory and the literature upon which it is based, we conclude that individuals’ attempts to form social categories could lead to three kinds of self-categorization. We label them intergroup categorization, ingroup categorization, and outgroup categorization. We review literature supporting these three types and argu...

Women, who have historically been less represented than men in leadership positions, emerge as leaders in some societies more than others. Unlike previous cultural explanations for this effect (rooted in differences in values, practices, or gender roles), we argue that a culture's tightness – its strength of norms and social sanctions – can provoke...

Optimal distinctiveness theory [Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: on being the same and different at the same time. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(5), 475–482] proposes that individuals have two fundamental and competing human needs—the need for inclusion and the need for differentiation—that can be met by membership in moderatel...

Traditional theories of self-interest cannot predict when individuals pursue relative and absolute economic outcomes in interdependent decision-making, but we argue that regulatory focus (Higgins, 1997) can. We propose that a concern with security (prevention focus) motivates concerns with social status, leading to the regulation of relative econom...

The Triple Dominance Measure (choosing between prosocial, individualistic, and competitive options) and the Slider Measure (“sliding” between various orientations, for example, from individualistic to prosocial) are two widely used techniques to measure social value orientation, that is, the weight individuals assign to own and others’ outcomes in...

Background Robotic surgery is used in several surgical procedures with limited evidence of clinical benefit. In some jurisdictions, the demand for robotic surgery may have been fueled by public perception of this novel technology. Therefore, we sought to investigate the public’s perception of robotic surgery. Study design We conducted a cross-sect...

Nielsen et al. (1) argue that Van Doesum et al. (2) need to consider three points for their interpretation of a positive association between individual-level social mindfulness (SoMi) and environmental performance (EPI) at the country level (3). The association is weaker when 1) it is controlled for GDP and 2) when the data of three countries are r...

Humans are social animals, but not everyone will be mindful of others to the same extent. Individual differences have been found, but would social mindfulness also be shaped by one’s location in the world? Expecting cross-national differences to exist, we examined if and how social mindfulness differs across countries. At little to no material cost...

The tension that negotiators face between claiming and creating value is particularly apparent when exchanging offers. We tested whether presenting a choice among first offers (Multiple Equivalent Simultaneous Offers; MESOs) reduces this negotiator dilemma and increases economic and relational outcomes. Six experiments comparing MESOs to a single p...

Day-to-day interactions often involve individuals interacting with groups, but little is known about the criteria that people use to decide which groups to approach or trust and which to avoid or distrust. Seven studies provide evidence for a “small = trustworthy” heuristic, such that people perceive numerically smaller groups as more benevolent in...

According to optimal distinctiveness theory, sufficiently small minority groups are associated with greater membership trust, even among members otherwise unknown, because the groups are seen as optimally distinctive. This article elaborates on the prediction's motivational and cognitive processes and tests whether sufficiently small minorities (de...

The agreement trap occurs when negotiators reach deals that are inferior to their best alternative agreements. The paper extends prior negotiation research by investigating whether teams display greater wisdom than solos in knowing when to walk away from the negotiating table, and thereby avoid the agreement trap. Two experiments compared teams and...

‘‘This is really still a nightmare — a German nightmare,’’ asserted Mechtilde Maier, Deutsche Telekom’s head of diversity. A multinational company with offices in about 50 countries, Deutsche Telekom is struggling at German headquarters to bring women into its leadership ranks. It is a startling result; at headquarters, one might expect the greates...

Negotiation is a ubiquitous social activity that for years has been recognized as an important skill in a wide range of organizational domains (e.g., Lax & Sebenius, 1986). Negotiation is ubiquitous, because it is used to accomplish many important tasks includ-ing making deals, resolving disputes, allocating resources, making decisions, and solving...

Failure to adapt is one of the most often cited reasons for the premature return of expatriate assignees. This chapter reviews and builds on research that suggests that the expatriate socialization process involves multiple stakeholders. We review the state of the expatriate socialization literature and introduce recent theoretical developments on...

recommendations on earlier versions of this manuscript. We thank Barbara Carlin, Bill Walker, Rick Larrick, and Lehman Benson who assisted us with data collection. We are appreciative to Leigh Plunkett Tost, Moira Praxedes, and Catherine Shea who worked as research assistants on this project. We are especially thankful to our colleagues in our

Leonardelli, Pickett, Joseph and Hess integrate Brewer’s (1991) optimal distinctiveness theory with the nested categorical context typically descriptive of an organization’s internal structure, where individuals belong to groups (subgroups) nested within more inclusive superordinate groups (such as functional units nested within an organization). I...

We propose that social categorization can encourage particular forms of intergroup cooperation because it differentiates a group in need from a group that can give aid. Moreover, social categorization is most likely to occur when individuals perceive procedural justice (i.e., fair treatment) from authorities in a superordinate group that includes t...

This research represents the first empirical investigation of the agreement bias in negotiation. The agreement bias is a negotiation trap characterized by settling for terms that are worse than one’s alternatives. Results from two experiments indicated that teams reduce the agreement bias by facilitating impasse in negotiations with a negative barg...

Optimal distinctiveness theory [Brewer, M. B. (1991). The social self: on being the same and different at the same time. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 17(5), 475–482] proposes that individuals have two fundamental and competing human needs—the need for inclusion and the need for differentiation—that can be met by membership in moderatel...

Metaphors such as icy stare depict social exclusion using cold-related concepts; they are not to be taken literally and certainly do not imply reduced temperature. Two experiments, however, revealed that social exclusion literally feels cold. Experiment 1 found that participants who recalled a social exclusion experience gave lower estimates of roo...

In 4 experiments, the authors investigated whether race is perceived to be part of the business leader prototype and, if so, whether it could explain differences in evaluations of White and non-White leaders. The first 2 studies revealed that "being White" is perceived to be an attribute of the business leader prototype, where participants assumed...

Individuals define themselves, at times, as who they are (e.g., a psychologist) and, at other times, as who they are not (e.g., not an economist). Drawing on social identity, optimal distinctiveness, and balance theories, four studies examined the nature of negational identity relative to affirmational identity. One study explored the conditions th...

Regulatory focus theory [Higgins, E. T. (1998). Promotion and prevention: Regulatory focus as a motivational principle. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 30, pp. 1–46). New York: Academic Press.] argues that concerns with growth and nurturance (i.e., a promotion focus) and concerns with safety and security (i.e....

Four experiments tested whether making multiple equivalent simultaneous offers affords economic and interpersonal capital at the bargaining table. In Experiment 1, respondents receiving simultaneous offers rather than a single offer were more satisfied with and more likely to accept an offer. In Experiment 2, negotiators who made multiple equivalen...

The authors contribute to the ongoing debate about the existence of a female leadership advantage by specifying contextual factors that moderate the likelihood of the emergence of such an advantage. The investigation considered whether the perceived role incongruence between the female gender role and the leader role led to a female leader disadvan...

Relative to White corporate leaders, African-Americans have typically been under-represented in upperlevel management and this study investigated whether psychological biases contribute to this under representation. In all, 479 participants from different racial backgrounds (African-American, White, Asian, and Hispanic) evaluated a White or African...

Humans are driven by a variety of needs, motives, and goals. Dating back to the early part of the twentieth century, researchers have attempted to understand human behavior by linking behavior to underlying motiva-tions(e.g., Hull, 1943; Spence, 1956). In line with this tradition of exam-ining human behavior within the framework of individual goals...

The authors demonstrate that in dyadic negotiations, negotiators with a promotion regulatory focus achieve superior outcomes than negotiators with prevention regulatory focus in two ways. First, a promotion focus leads negotiators to claim more resources at the bargaining table. In the first two studies, promotion-focused negotiators paid more atte...

We propose that in dyadic negotiations simultaneously offering multiple package proposals that are of the same value to the proposer (what we refer to as multiple equivalent simultaneous offers, or MESOs), affords a distributive and integrative advantage to that negotiator. Making MESOs has a number of advantages over simply making a single package...

In three studies, the authors demonstrate that a promotion regulatory focus leads to greater distributive and integrative negotiated outcomes than a prevention regulatory focus. In Study 1, correlational evidence demonstrates that individuals with a greater promotion focus tend to give more attention to their target prices and ultimately achieve be...

Just as negotiating has become an ongoing process, so too has learning new negotiating techniques. "Improving your negotiation skills," write the co-authors of this article, "is a long journey that involves constant reflection, awareness, and openness to feedback." In the article, a valuable and extremely useful primer for negotiators, they describ...

The article discusses a study that looks at negational social identities--group memberships defined by what they do not represent rather than by what they do represent. The article states that balance theory, put forth by F. Heider, provides a theoretical ground for explaining negational identification, and that optimal distinctiveness theory (ODT)...

The social identity literature has traditionally examined affirmational identities, that is, groups defined by what they are (e.g., "we are management scholars"), but has largely overlooked negational identities, that is, groups defined by what they are not (e.g., "we are not Republicans") as a source of social identification. There are two notable...

Previous research has found that, among stigmatized group members, perceiving discrimination against the ingroup simultaneously yields a positive indirect effect on self-worth (mediated by ingroup identification) and a negative direct effect (Branscombe, Schmitt, & Harvey, 1999). This study not only replicated these effects with a sample of women,...

Merging ideas from optimal distinctiveness theory (M. B. Brewer, 1991) and the self-affirmation literature, we predicted that individuals would have a greater need to affirm memberships in minority groups than memberships in majority groups. Furthermore, ingroup favoritism produced by minority group members, but not by majority group members, was h...

Self-report distributions of self-evaluations are proposed to convey information beyond unidimensional (e.g., Likert-type) measures. Two studies tested the hypothesis that the shape of a distribution-type measure of self-evaluation of intellectual ability, as well as the central tendency and variability, is a meaningful indicator of individual diff...

The present research examined the effects of the need to belong and group size on cooperation in a public goods dilemma. On the basis of previous research (R. F. Baumeister & M. R. Leary, 1995), it was expected that those high in the need to belong would cooperate most. In addition, it was expected that the need to belong would predict cooperation...

The impact on self-esteem of activating self-doubt was investi- gated in three studies. Individuals with enduring high self- doubt were expected to be more threatened by an experimental induction of self-doubt (modeled on the ease of retrieval para- digm) than individuals low in enduring self-doubt, and their self-esteem was predicted to decline. T...

This research examined reasons for the frequently obtained finding that members of numerically minority groups exhibit greater intergroup discrimination than members of majority groups and also sought to determine the conditions under which members of both majority and minority groups exhibit intergroup discrimination. Experiment 1 examined the rol...

Merging ideas from optimal distinctiveness theory and the self-affirmation literature, we introduce the concept of collective self-affirmation and propose that members of numerical minorities, but not majorities, are motivated to affirm their group membership. We also propose that this collective self-affirmation motive causes, and is satisfied by,...

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University, 1998. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-84). Advisor: Marilynn B. Brewer, Dept. of Psychology.

Honors essay: Dept. of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 14-15).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-115). Advisor: Marilynn B. Brewer, Dept. of Psychology.