Chapter 09
Relationships in Negotiation
Overview
In this chapter,
we will focus on the ways these past and future relationships impact present
negotiations. Our treatment of relationships will come in two major sections.
First, we examine how a past, ongoing, or future relationship between
negotiators affects the negotiation process. This discussion considers general
assumptions that have been made about the theory and practice of
negotiation—assumptions that have not taken into account any relationship between
the parties—and provides a critical evaluation of the adequacy of negotiation
theory for understanding and managing negotiations within relationships. We
present a taxonomy of different kinds of relationships and the negotiations
that are likely to occur within them. We also broadly describe research studies
that have examined negotiation processes within existing relationships. Second,
we look at three major themes—reputations, trust, and justice—that are
particularly critical to effective negotiations within a relationship.
Learning Objectives
1.
The adequacy of established research for understanding
negotiation within relationships.
2.
Forms of relationships.
3.
Key elements in managing negotiations within
relationships.
I.
Challenging
How Relationships in Negotiation Have Been Studied
For the past 50 years, researchers
have simulated complex negotiations by simplifying the complexity in a research
laboratory. They create simplified negotiating games and simulations, find
undergraduate and graduate university students who are willing to be research
participants, and test the effects of important influential elements under
controlled laboratory condition. One
group of researchers critical of the dominance of laboratory-based approaches
to studying negotiation argue that researchers have been too quick to
generalize from simple research studies (“transactional negotiations”) to
negotiating in complex relationships. There are several ways that an existing
relationship changes negotiation dynamics.
A. Aspects
of relationships that could change our understanding of negotiation strategy
and tactics:
1. Negotiating
within relationships takes place over time.
2. Negotiation
is often not a way to discuss an issue, but a way to learn more about the other
party and increase interdependence.
3. Resolution
of simple distributive issues has implications for the future.
4. Distributive
issues within relationship negotiations can be emotionally hot.
5. Negotiating
within relationships may never end.
a) Parties
may defer negotiations over tough issues in order to start on the right foot.
b) Attempting
to anticipate the future and negotiate everything up front is often impossible.
c) Issues
on which parties truly disagree may never go away.
6. In
many negotiations, the other person is the focal problem.
7. In
some negotiations, relationship preservation is the negotiation goal, and
parties may make concessions on substantive issues to preserve or enhance the
relationship.
II. Negotiations in Communal Relationships
1. There has been
somewhat more research on negotiation in communal-sharing relationships and compared
to those in other kinds of negotiations researchers have found that parties who
are in a communal-sharing relationship:
a)
Are more cooperative and empathetic.
b)
Perform better on both decision-making and performance-coordination
tasks.
c)
Focus their attention on the other party’s outcomes as
well as their own.
d)
Are more likely to share information with the other
and less likely to use coercive tactics.
e)
May be more likely to use compromise or problem solving
as strategies for resolving conflicts.
III. Key Elements in
Managing Negotiations within Relationships
A.
Research has identified several important aspects of
reputation.
1.
Reputation is a “perceptual identity, reflective of
the combination of salient personal characteristics and accomplishments,
demonstrated behavior and intended images preserved over time, as observed
directly and/or as reported from secondary sources”
a) Reputations are
perceptual and highly subjective in nature.
b) An individual can
have a number of different, even conflicting, reputations because she may act
quite differently in different situations.
c) Reputations are
shaped by past behavior.
d) Reputation is
influenced by an individual’s personal characteristics and accomplishments.
e) Reputations develop
over time; once developed, they are hard to change. Early experiences with another shape our
views, which we bring to new situations in the form of expectations. These expectations are then confirmed or
disconfirmed by the next set of experiences.
f) Other's
reputations can shape emotional states as well as their expectations.
g) Negative
reputations are difficult to “repair.”
B.
Trust
1. There are three factors that contribute to
the level of trust one negotiator may have for another:
a) the individual's chronic disposition toward
trust
b) situation factors
c) the history of the relationship between the
parties
C.
Trust repair
1. Since trust and positive negotiation
processes and outcomes appear to be so critical, we should comment on
ways that broken trust can be repaired in order to return negotiations toward a more
productive direction.
2. Recent research has shown that there are
three major strategies that a trust violator can use to repair trust.
a) Verbal accounts – use of words or emotional
expressions in an effort to repair the violation.
b) Reparations – payment of
compensation to the victims for the consequences suffered from the violator.
c) structural solutions – make the
effort to create rules, regulations, and procedures to minimize the likelihood
of violation in the future.
D. Justice.
1. Justice can take
several forms:
a) Distributive justice is about the distribution of outcomes.
b) Procedural justice is about the process of determining outcomes.
c) Interactional justice is about how parties treat each other in one-to-one
relationships.
d) Systemic justice is about how organizations appear to treat groups of
individuals and
the norms that develop for how they should be treated.
2. The issue of
fairness is beginning to receive some systematic investigation in negotiation
dynamics.
3. Several authors
have studied how the actions taken by third parties are particularly
subject to concerns about fairness (see Karambayya, Brett, and Lytle, 1992).
4. Justice issues
are also raised when individuals negotiate inside their organizations, such as
to create a
unique or specialized set of job duties and responsibilities.
5. Rather than
making things more fair, negotiated exchanges may serve to emphasize the
conflict between
actors who are blind to their own biases and inclined to see the other party’s
motives and
characteristics in an unfavorable light although we have identified these forms of justice as
separate entities, they are often intertwined.
E. Relationships
among reputation, trust and justice.
1. Trust, justice,
and reputation are all central to relationship negotiations and feed
each other.
F. Repairing
a relationship.
1. Fisher and Ertel
(1995) suggest the following diagnostic steps in beginning to work on
improving a relationship:
a) What might be causing any present misunderstanding, and what can I do to
understand it better?
b) What might be causing a lack of trust, and what can I do to begin to
repair trust that might have been broken?
c) What might be causing one or both of us to feel coerced, and what can I
do to put the focus on persuasion rather than coercion?
d) What might be causing one or both of us to feel disrespected, and what
can I do to demonstrate acceptance
and respect?
e) What might
be causing one or both of us to get upset, and what can I do to balance
emotion and reason?
Summary
In this chapter,
we explored the way that existing relationships shape negotiation.
Much of
negotiation theory and research reported in this volume is based on studies of
negotiators in simulated market transactions—that is, simplified decision
situations in which negotiators who have no past or future relationship with
each other focus on key issues such as price and terms. But much actual
negotiation occurs within established relationships, in which the past history
and future expectations of the parties with each other significantly affects
how they negotiate in the present. In this chapter we indicated why negotiation
within relationships is likely to be different from market transactions,
discussed different forms that relationships could take, and reviewed what
research has informed us about how a relationship context might shape
negotiation behavior.
Many negotiations
concern how to work (and live) together more effectively over time, how to
coordinate actions and share responsibilities, or how to manage problems that
have arisen in the relationship. In this chapter, we evaluated the status of
previous negotiation research—which has focused almost exclusively on
market-exchange relationships—and evaluated its status for different types of
relationships, particularly communal-sharing and authority-ranking
relationships.
We
have examined three core elements common to many negotiations within
relationships: reputations, trust, and justice. Trust issues are central to
relationships. While some amount of trust exists in market-transaction
negotiations, trust is more critical to communal-sharing relationships in which
the parties have some history, an anticipated future, and an attachment to each
other. In addition, justice concerns are absolutely central to negotiation in
relationships.
