Choosing a Group Representative: The Impact of Perceived Organizational Support on the Preferences for Deviant Representatives in Work Negotiations St ephanie Demoulin, C atia Pinto Teixeira, C eline Gillis, Edwine Goldoni, and Florence Stinglhamber Universit e catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium Keywords negotiation, representatives, perceived organizational support, group deviance, organizational identification, ingroup typicality. Correspondence St ephanie Demoulin, Place Cardinal Mercier 10, bte L3.05.01, 1348, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium; e-mail: stephanie.demoulin@ uclouvain.be Abstract Group representative selection in negotiation is a topic that has only recently attracted researchers’ attention. This article focuses on workplace negotiations and examines how employees’ selection of representatives depends on their level of perceived organizational support (POS). We predict and show that employees who experience high levels of POS send to the negotiation table ingroup representatives who are perceived as close to (rather than distant from) the management team. The first study establishes the effect. The second study replicates the findings and investi- gates the underlying mechanisms. Results show that POS impacts endorsement of pro-management representatives through an increased perception that these deviant members are typical of the employee’s group. Change in perceived typicality is triggered by POS directly and via an increase in employees’ organizational identification. We discuss of the positive and negative consequences for groups who send to the negotia- tion representatives who are close to the opposing group. Negotiations between employers (or management teams) and employees are not only common but an essential part of the everyday organizational life. Because of the frequently large number of people concerned, negotiations at the workplace often rely on representatives (Teixeira, Demoulin, & Yzerbyt, 2011). A representative is an agent that is selected by a group of people (i.e., the constituen- cies) to represent them at the negotiation table. Worker representation is most evident in unionized environments but it is by no means the only type of representation instance that can occur in the organizational life. More often than not, informal representations occur in which a team of workers delegates one of their colleagues to, for example, discuss and negotiate problems or conflicts with their managers. Thus, although employment and labor relationships might differ across nations and cultures, worker representation, at least in informal settings, is a constant across organizational envi- ronments. Research in the negotiation literature has shown that depending on who happens to be representing the constituencies at the negotiation table, different kinds of negotiation outcomes might arise (e.g., Stei- nel et al., 2010). In particular, studies have shown that representative members of the constituency group who are similar rather than different from the opponent negotiation party group tend to be more atten- tive and responsive to the information sent by their constituencies (Van Kleef, Steinel, & Homan, 2013). Negotiation and Conflict Management Research Volume 9, Number 2, Pages 120–140 120 © 2016 International Association for Conflict Management and Wiley Periodicals, Inc.