Margaret Neale’s research focuses primarily on negotiation and team performance. Her work has extended judgment and decision-making research from cognitive psychology to the field of negotiation. In particular, she studies cognitive and social processes that produce departures from effective negotiating behavior. Within the context of teams, her work explores aspects of team composition and group process that enhance the ability of teams to share the information necessary for learning and problem solving in both face-to-face and virtual team environments. Margaret A. Neale is the Adams Distinguished Professor of Management, Emerita. She was the Graduate School of Business John G. McCoy-Banc One Corporation Professor of Organizations and Dispute Resolution from 2000-2012. Trust Faculty Fellow in 2011-2012 and in 2000-2001. From 1997-2000, she was the Academic Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Prior to joining Stanford’s faculty in 1995, she was the J.L. and Helen Kellogg Distinguished Professor of Dispute Resolution and Organizations at the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy from Northeast Louisiana University, her Master’s degrees from the Medical College of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University and her PhD in Business Administration from the University of Texas. She began her academic career as a member of the faculty at the Eller School of Management of the University of Arizona. Professor Neale’s major research interests include bargaining and negotiation, distributed work groups, and team composition, learning, and performance. She is the author of over 70 articles on these topics and is a coauthor of three books: Organizational Behavior: A Management Challenge (third edition) (with L. Stroh and G. Northcraft) (Erlbaum Press, 2002); Cognition and Rationality in Negotiation (with M.H. Bazerman) (Free Press, 1991); Negotiating Rationally (with M.H. Bazerman) (Free Press, 1992); and one research series Research on Managing in Groups and Teams (with Elizabeth Mannix) (Emerald Press). She is or has served on the editorial boards of the Administrative Science Quarterly, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, International Journal of Conflict Management, and Human Resource Management Review. In addition to her teaching and research activities, Professor Neale has conducted executive seminars and management development programs in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Holland, Switzerland, Brazil, Thailand, France, Canada, Nicaragua, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Israel, and Jamaica for public agencies, city governments, health care and trade associations, universities, small businesses and Fortune 500 corporations in the area of negotiation skills, managerial decision making, managing teams, and workforce diversity. She is the faculty director of three executive programs at Stanford University: Influence and Negotiation Strategies, Managing Teams for Innovation and Success, and the Executive Program for Women Leaders.
“Not every negotiation ends in an agreement. Sometimes you have to say, ‘I’d really like to help out, but I am just way too overextended right now.’”
"The problem most people have is they think they're going in for a battle, so they armor up and that can make you look desperate. There's nothing I can do to force you [my employer] to say, 'yes.' What that means is I have to give you a proposal to show why it's in your interest to say, 'yes.'"
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“We don’t know how biased we are,” Neale says. “After all, we don’t have the luxury of a control condition — knowing how we or others would have behaved under different circumstances. We believe that what we perceive is real and objective.”
Neale points to a body of research showing that people with skills and expertise are ironically more tentative and uncertain in their area of specialty precisely because they know so much. People who are not experts, however, often exude far more confidence in their beliefs than their skills and experience would justify. Our nation’s struggle with COVID-19 has brought these imbalances to the forefront.