Power imbalance and the pattern of exchange in dyadic negotiation

We investigate how a key structural aspect of negotiation—power—combines with aspiration level to affect the interaction pattern of negotiators. Conflicting research findings have revealed that in most cases negotiators with anequal balance of power reach agreements of higher joint gain than negotiators with an unequal power balance, but in some instances the opposite result has been found. We suggest that it is important to consider the interaction between the negotiators to explain these varying findings. We propose that when unequal power negotiators are able to reach agreements of high joint gain it is due to the efforts of the low power party. In addition, we argue that the low power player will be most likely to drive the search for a solution of high joint gain when he or she also has high aspirations. We tested these proposals in a market negotiation with integrative potential. To examine the pattern of negotiation, all offers and counter-offers were written. The results indicated that overall, equal power dyads achieved higher joint outcomes than unequal power dyads. Under unequal power, the hypothesis that higher joint outcomes would be obtained when the low power player had high aspirations received partial support. In addition, support was found for the hypothesis that in unequal power dyads low power players would be responsible for driving solutions of higher joint gain.     

众包社区创意领地行为影响机制研究

在共享经济对社会资源重新分配的背景下,现有研究较多从技术嵌入、平台监管、社会网络等客观方面揭示众包社区创意领地行为的产生机制,文章则聚焦创意资源供给者的主观方面因素,探究社会价值取向、内群体认同对创意领地行为的影响以及网络面子意识在以上关系中的调节作用。研究结果表明：（1）众包社区成员的社会价值取向对其创意领地行为具有重要影响,其中亲自我创客比亲社会创客更可能实施创意领地行为;（2）社会价值取向通过内群体认同对创意领地行为产生影响;（3）网络面子意识不仅调节社会价值取向与内群体认同的直接关系,而且进一步调节社会价值取向通过内群体认同与创意领地行为的间接关系;（4）与网络面子意识较低的亲自我者相比,网络面子意识较高的亲自我者实施创意领地行为的倾向得到了显著改善,甚至转而进行创意分享和贡献,而网络面子意识对亲社会者的创意领地行为的影响效果却并不显著。     

The effects of reciprocation wariness on negotiation behavior and outcomes

This study examined the influence of reciprocation wariness, a general fear of exploitation in interpersonal relationships, on negotiators’ motivational orientation, direct information sharing and negotiation outcomes. We predicted that low-wary negotiators are more likely to be prosocial and to engage in direct information sharing, and low-wary negotiators will perceive their opponents more positively after the negotiation. We asked 150 graduate students of business administration to formed 75 dyads to participate in a simulated business negotiation, each taking the role of a buyer or a seller. The results showed that reciprocation wariness had a significant effect on negotiators’ motivational orientation and the amount of information sharing. Negotiating dyads with low–low reciprocation wariness got higher joint gains than those with high–high reciprocation wariness, and information sharing fully mediated the relationship. After the negotiation, low-wary negotiators evaluated the other party more positively and were more willing to interact with their opponents in the future. Contributions and limitations are discussed.     

Resolving the empty core: trust as a determinant of outcomes in three-party negotiations

This research examined how trust affected resource allocation in a three-party negotiation. Negotiators were presented with an empty core problem in which their theoretical share of resources exceeded the resources available for distribution. We tested which of three components of trust—reliability, predictability and empathy—predicted negotiators’ outcomes. We distinguished between absolute and relative trust. We found that relative trust was a more consistent predictor of individual outcomes than absolute trust and that the most trusted party in a network obtained the highest individual outcomes. This finding highlights the importance of social context in shaping trust judgements. The component of trust that predicted individuals’ outcomes was affected by structural power. High and low power negotiators benefited from conveying empathy (identity-based trust), whereas moderate power negotiators benefited from conveying predictability (knowledge-based trust). Low power parties also benefited from appearing unreliable (low calculus-based trust). The research reported in this paper was supported by a grant from the Australian Research Council. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 International Association of Conflict Management Conference, Park City, Utah.     

Good Grief! Anxiety Sours the Economic Benefits of First Offers

Two studies tested whether making first offers influences negotiators’ feelings of anxiety and their sense of satisfaction. The results of Study 1 show that the strategy of making the first offer led to decreased levels of satisfaction with the negotiation process and outcomes. This effect was mediated by perceived feelings of anxiety. Study 2 discerned that anxiety about making the first offer derived from self-perception concerns, represented as anxiety about being taken advantage of by the opposing party. In both studies, anxiety led negotiators who made the first offer to be relatively less satisfied with the negotiation, than negotiators who did not make the first offer, despite the increased economic gains associated with making the first offer.     

Blinded by Power: Untangling Mixed Results Regarding Power and Efficiency in Negotiation

Negotiators are often advised to seek information about their counterparts’ power. However, we know little about how such information affects negotiators’ behaviours and outcomes. Study 1 considered dyadic negotiations in which negotiators have symmetric or asymmetric best alternatives to the negotiated agreement (BATNAs). It also examined the impacts of (a)symmetry and knowledge of a counterpart’s BATNA on agreement efficiency (indexed by joint gains), and how knowledge alters negotiators’ realised power (indexed by percentage of resource claimed) in BATNA-asymmetric negotiations. Studies 2 and 3 focussed on BATNA-asymmetric negotiations. Study 2 tested the mechanism by which knowledge affects efficiency. Study 3 considered the impacts of knowledge on equity concerns, perceived power and information exchange about preferences. The findings indicate the following: knowledge of BATNA asymmetries (rather than the existence of BATNA asymmetries) adversely affects agreement efficiency; this knowledge increases strong negotiators’ focus on value claiming, judgement errors about counterparts’ preferences, perceived power and realised power, but impedes their information-sharing behaviour about preferences. Their focus on value claiming mediates the relationship between knowledge and judgement errors, whereas judgement errors mediate the relationship between their focus on value claiming and agreement efficiency. Furthermore, knowledge of BATNA asymmetries leads to contrasting perceptions of fairness. Strong negotiators with knowledge believe that a fair agreement should reflect their power advantage; weak negotiators generally tend to judge fairness based on equality. Counterintuitively, knowing one’s own strengths can lead to ‘winning’ a meagre prize and neglecting the opportunity for value creation by trading-off on negotiated issues.     

Maybe It’s Right,Maybe It’s Wrong: Structural and Social Determinants of Deception in Negotiation

Context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. Focusing on negotiators use of deception, we used a simulated two-party negotiation to test how three contextual variables—regulatory focus, power, and trustworthiness—interacted to shift negotiators’ ethical thresholds. We demonstrated that these three variables interact to either inhibit or activate deception, providing support for an interactionist model of ethical decision-making. Three patterns emerged from our analyses. First, low power inhibited and high power activated deception. Second, promotion-focused negotiators favored sins of omission, whereas prevention-focused negotiators favored sins of commission. Third, low cognition-based trust influenced deception when negotiators experience fit between power and regulatory focus, whereas affect-based trust influenced deception when negotiators experience misfit between these structural context variables. We conclude that regulatory focus primes different moral templates: promotion-focused negotiators’ decision to deceive is determined by moral pragmatism, whereas prevention-focused negotiators’ decision to deceive is determined by opportunism. Because each combination of power and regulatory focus was tied to a specific subcomponent of trust, we further conclude that negotiators engage in motivated information search to determine whether they should deceive their opponents.     

Ethical reasoning in business‐to‐business negotiations: evidence from relationships in the chemical industry in Germany

This article explores managers’ ethical reasoning for behaviors in price negotiations using evidence from 15 in‐depth interviews conducted with sales and purchasing representatives in the chemical industry in Germany. Applying transaction cost economics, we find that negotiators in commoditized market‐like exchanges either refer to deontological norms such as not to lie, or they neglect a role for ethics, arguing that distributive negotiation is per se opportunistic. In contrast, exchanges of products with higher asset specificity lead to stronger informational integration which is supported with teleological justifications. Some negotiators use teleological justification to build business on trust rather than on economic safeguards as their firm norms would require. For negotiators, our results suggest considering institutional context and adjusting ethical reasoning to the negotiation situation. Firms need to recognize and find ways to address the potential conflicts of their internal norms with their frontline managers’ attempts to act in the firms’ best economic and ethical interests.     

Negotiators’ Attitudes toward Signing Business Contracts: Evidence from Greece and Israel

This study extends beyond negotiation process and styles, and focuses on negotiators’ tendency to sign formal contracts. Drawing on a risk mitigation perspective, it examines the influence of businesspeople's levels of horizontal and vertical individualism‐collectivism, ethical idealism, and trust propensity on their attitudes toward signing formal negotiated business contracts in Greece and in Israel. A survey questionnaire was translated from English to Greek and to Hebrew, and 649 responses were collected from employees who worked in industries such as banking, insurance, construction, manufacturing, retailing, and tourism in the Greek and Israeli private and public sectors. Our findings suggest that higher levels of horizontal individualism, horizontal collectivism, and ethical idealism increase employees’ tendency to sign formal contracts, whereas lower levels of general trust are associated with a higher propensity to sign formal contracts. Interestingly, employees’ propensity to sign formal contracts was significantly lower in Israel than in Greece. We argue that the propensity to sign formal contracts, and thus to mitigate potential agreement risks, is dependent on the individuals’ cultural and personal attributes. The study provides practitioners with a set of cultural and individual attributes that can serve as predictors of negotiators’ predisposition toward signing business contracts. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Sweet Little Lies: Social Context and the Use of Deception in Negotiation

Social context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. We use a simulated negotiation to test how three dimensions of social context—dyadic gender composition, negotiation strategy, and trust—interact to influence one micro-ethical decision, the use of deception. Deception in all-male dyads was relatively unaffected by trust or the other negotiator’s strategy. In mixed-sex dyads, negotiators consistently increased their use of deception when three forms of trust (identity, benevolent, deterrent) were low and opponents used an accommodating strategy. However, in all-female dyads, negotiators appeared to use multiple and shifting reference points in deciding when to deceive the other party. In these dyads, the use of deception increased when a competitive strategy combined with low benevolence-based trust or an accommodating strategy combined with high identity-based trust. Deception in all-female dyads decreased when a competitive strategy was used in the context of low deterrence-based trust.     

Getting the Floor: Motive-Consistent Strategy and Individual Outcomes in Multi-Party Negotiations

Social motives influence negotiators actions and reactions. In this study we proposed that social motives moderate the relationship between persistence in the use of integrative or distributive negotiation strategy and individual outcomes in 33 four-person mixed-motive negotiations. Cooperative negotiators who persisted in using integrative strategy achieved higher outcomes than those who did not persist. Persistence in the use of integrative strategy did not pay off for individualistic negotiators in this multi-party setting. We theorized that this pattern of results was due to cooperative and individualistic negotiators using strategy differently. We found that cooperative negotiators used more motive-consistent integrative strategy and less motive-inconsistent distributive strategy than individualistic negotiators, whose pattern of strategy use was consistent with their self-interested motives, providing evidence for our motive consistency theory.     

The effect of communication medium on negotiation performance

Concepts of media efficiency and media richness are employed to describe the impact of communication media on two key aspects of negotiation behavior—reducing uncertainty about the task, and managing equivocality about negotiator's bargaining orientation. A controlled experiment was conducted to examine how the use of either audio or text forms of verbal communication, and the presence or absence of visual communication, impacts negotiation performance in a bilateral monopoly task. Each member of a pair of negotiators received private instructions either to maximize joint profit (a cooperative bargaining orientation) or to maximize individual profit (an individualistic bargaining orientation). Negotiation performance was measured via the total amount of relative cooperativeness of verbal communication and joint profit. In the audio mode as opposed to the text mode, the total amount of verbal communication and joint profit was increased. In the presence of visual communication the relative cooperativeness and joint profit of pairs of individualistic negotiators was less than that of cooperative negotiators. In the absence of visual communication the relative cooperativeness and joint profit of pairs of individualistic negotiators was no less than that of cooperative negotiators. In sum the findings suggest that uncertainty regarding the logical structure of the task was reduced primarily via verbal communciation, while equivocality regarding the bargaining orientation of the other negotiator was reduced primarily via visual communication. The implications for group decision and negotiation research and practice are explored.     

A prototype NSS based on problem structure and suggestions toward more comprehensive negogiation support

Seeking an effective approach to supporting negotiation through the use of computer technology, we have constructed a prototype negotiation support system based on the concept of problem structure. Problem structure refers to the characteristics of the feasible settlement space and efficient frontiers as defined by the joint utility distribution of negotiators' utilities. Problem structure is recognized as playing a major role in negotiation processes and outcomes. The cognitive complexity and inherent uncertainty of typical negotiations make it difficult for negotiators to effectively visualize and “navigate” the settlement space defined by the problem structure. As a result, negotiators often resort to suboptimizing heuristics which produce inefficient and/or unsatisfying outcomes. It follows that a promising approach to negotiation support is to exploit the computational speed and graphics capabilities of computer technology to make problem structure and its implications more accessible. Thus, our prototype is designed to allow negotiators to hypothesize problem structure and to explore and manipulate the resulting settlement space quickly and easily. Preliminary experimentation has demonstrated the value of this approach and has suggested areas for extended, comprehensive support. A negotiation process formalism, Cognitive Action Theory, neural network technology, and computer simulation are well-suited to providing more comprehensive support, and we suggest an architecture for delivery through NSS.     

Reciprocal Cooperation and the Moderating Effect of Individualism: A Five-Country Negotiation Study

ABSTRACT

Researchers have conceptualized the problem-solving approach to include cooperation between negotiators in order to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. The observed cooperation between parties embodies the concept of positive reciprocity where negotiators match the cooperative bargaining strategy of their counterparts. Using this premise, the current study investigates reciprocity through the relationship between negotiators’ perceptions of their counterpart's cooperative behaviors and their own reported behaviors. The mitigating effect of individualism-collectivism on the above relationship is also explored. The findings provide empirical evidence that negotiators’ perceptions of their counterpart's cooperative behaviors are positively related to their own strategy. This relationship was consistently supported across five groups of business negotiators: Canadian Anglophone, Greek, Mexican, Filipino, and American. However, this positive reciprocal relationship is negated when the negotiator comes from an individualistic-type culture.     

Perceived organizational justice, trust, and OCB: A study of Chinese workers in joint ventures and state-owned enterprises

We examine the relationships among perceived organizational justice, trust, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) of workers in joint ventures (JVs) and state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in China. We hypothesize different dimensions of organizational justice are related to trust in organization and trust in supervisor, which will in turn affect workers’ OCB. Some of these relationships are hypothesized to be different in SOEs and JVs owing to the differences in management practices and employment relationships between them. Our hypotheses are tested on data collected from 295 supervisor–subordinate dyads in a JV and 253 such dyads in an SOE. The analyses reveal that (1) the positive effect of distributive justice on trust in organization is stronger in JVs than in SOEs, (2) the positive effect of procedure justice on trust on organization is stronger in SOEs than in JVs, (3) the effect of interaction justice on trust in supervisor is similar for both types of organization; (4) trust in organization affects OCB in both SOEs and JVs, and (5) trust in supervisor affects OCB in JVs only.     

I Expected More from You: The Influence of Close Relationships and Perspective Taking on Negotiation Offers

Three experimental studies show that interpersonal relationships influence the expectations of negotiators at the negotiation table. That is, negotiators expect more generous negotiation offers from close others (Study 1), and when expectations are not met, negative emotions arise, resulting in negative economic and relational outcomes (Study 2). Finally, a boundary condition for the effect of interpersonal relationships on negotiation expectations is shown: perspective taking leads the parties to expect less from friends than from acquaintances (Study 3). The findings suggest that perspective taking helps negotiators reach agreement in relationships. The article concludes with implications for practice and future research directions.     

Moderating Effects of Entrepreneurial Orientation on Market Orientation‐Performance Linkage: Evidence from Chinese Small Firms*

Literature revealed that an appropriate alignment between firm strategic orientation and market positioning is critical because of its impact on firm performance. The alignment is especially crucial for small businesses as a result of their limited resource base. However, studies have not adequately accounted for the joint effect of entrepreneurial orientation (EO) and market orientation (MO) on firm performance in different institutional environments, such as transitional economies. In this study, we examine the moderating effect of EO on the linkage between MO and firm performance among small enterprises in China. We have found that MO, alone and in conjunction with certain EO dimensions, is positively related to firm performance. More specifically, innovativeness and proactiveness have positively moderated the relationship between MO and performance. We discuss managerial implications and offer suggestions for future research.     

Cultural determinants of alliance management capability – an analysis of Japanese MNCs in India

This study examines the role of national and organizational culture in alliance management in the context of three prominent joint ventures between India and Japan, which reached diverse alliance outcomes. It uses the case study method as a tool for an initial rich exploratory analysis (Yin 2013) of alliance management capabilities that may later be tested on a larger dataset. The study finds that national and organizational culture is both important factors of alliance management capability. It highlights the specific role of trust, consensus in decision-making, communication and relationship building as key constituents of alliance management capability. This paper thus contributes to an important strand of literature on alliance management in the context of two important Asian players from the developed and emerging markets. Its focus on cultural factors as determinants of alliance management helps to establish a managerial blueprint leading to positive alliance outcomes for such ventures in future and to establish a roadmap for increased interaction between India and Japan.     

Study of Commitment Antecedents: The Dynamic Point of View

This study adopted a dynamic perspective in investigating the effects of employees’ perception of equity (PoE) and perception of organizational politics (POP) on their trust in organizations and the subsequent effect of such on their commitment. Data were collected from 216 employees from various industries. The positive effect of PoE and negative effect of POP on employees’ trust were confirmed in this study. It is also found that employees’ trust in organizations has a positive effect on their organizational commitment. This study also confirmed the mediation of employees’ trust on the relationships between POP, PoE, and organizational commitment. Besides, the moderation of employees’ trust on the relationships between POP, PoE, and organizational commitment was not confirmed. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.