The Psychology of Negotiations in the 21st Century Workplace

New Challenges and New Solutions

Barry M. Goldman, Debra L. Shapiro, Barry M. Goldman, Debra L. Shapiro

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136483547
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Gestione industriale

The "litigation explosion" in the 21st century workplace means increasing costs and risks of lawsuits. Negotiation appears the attractive alternative to litigation. This new volume, with contributions from experts in psychology, management, and other disciplines, bridges the gap between management and negotiation research. Managers, students, and researchers interested in the field of negotiation will find this new book in SIOP's Organizational Frontiers series of interest.

Section 1

Introduction

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Negotiation in the 21st Century Workplace: New Challenges and New Solutions

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Barry M. Goldman and Debra L. Shapiro

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INTRODUCTION

The 21st century workplace is a “new world” relative to the workplace that preceded it, and this new world (for reasons explained in this book) necessitates negotiating effectively in ways that have generally been under-studied in prior negotiation or management studies. The “litigation explosion” (Groth, Goldman, Gilliland, & Bies, 2002; Olson, 1992) is among the ways distinguishing the 21st century workplace from work experiences in earlier days. The increasing cost and risk of lawsuits makes negotiation— rather than litigation—an attractive alternative. Additional attributes that distinguish the 21st century workplace from work experiences in earlier days include organizations’: increasing willingness to restructure in ways that result in employee layoffs (unheard of in earlier times; cf. Levine, 2002); globalization of products and services (Friedman, 2005); greater employee diversity (van Knippenberg & Schippers, 2007); and greater reliance on technology-mediated communications among employees, including team members and suppliers (Bailey & Kurland, 2002; Valley, White, & Iacobucci, 1992) increasingly dispersed around the globe. Cumulatively, these changes in the nature of work necessitate negotiation skills for not only preventing or resolving disputes in ways less costly than litigation, but also conducting everyday as well as more complex business transactions. Not surprisingly, then, negotiation skills are increasingly viewed by organizations as strategically important for individual employees as well as managers and thus as a source of organizations’ sustainable competitive advantage (Barney, 1991; Thompson, 2009).

The purpose of this book is to bridge the gap between management and negotiation research so that employees, managers, and their organizations can all become better negotiators and so that negotiators can be more effective within the organization. Collectively, the chapters in this book illuminate that 21st century employees (at all levels) can— via tactics that are informed by relevant negotiation or management research (often treated in isolation of each other)—become more effective (a) fairness managers, (b) emotion managers, (c) social or group-level managers, and (d) organizational managers. Each chapter specifies tactics likely to aid employees or managers in achieving their goal (such as effectively managing fairness, emotions, social influences, and organizational transaction costs), informed by relevant negotiation or management research. Each chapter concludes by noting the 21st century workplace challenges associated with using the advised tactics and thus the questions in need of future negotiation research. Taken together, the chapters in this book therefore promise to set the next generation’s research agenda in negotiation. The research agenda emerging from this book’s collection of chapters is likely to have strategic importance for both managers and negotiators since the future research needs named in each chapter’s conclusion are guided, at least in part, by the 21st century workplace management challenges illuminated in each chapter.

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A FUNDAMENTAL ASSUMPTION OF THIS BOOK: THE WORKPLACE OF THE 21ST CENTURY NECESSITATES REVISITING EARLIER MANAGEMENT AND NEGOTIATION ADVICE

Before we describe the contents of this book, let us highlight its fundamental assumption: Previously prescribed advice pertaining to effectively managing employees in general or effectively managing negotiations in particular needs to be revisited in light of 21st century workplace characteristics. If this fundamental assumption is true, then one or both of the following statements must also be true: (a) the process of managing or negotiating differs in the 21st century workplace relative to earlier times; or (b) the management or negotiation context differs in the 21st century workplace relative to earlier times. To better understand these issues, let us step back a century.

In 1910, the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter was 27 years old and concerned with how an economy develops. He argued that change in the economy arose from “new combinations of productive means” (Arthur, 2009, p. 19; Kreps, 1990). Schumpeter identified innovation as the critical element of economic change (Pol & Carroll, 2006) and introduced new ways of viewing the field of economics at the time by stating that entrepreneurs disturbed the expected (at the time) equilibrium by introducing innovation (Schumpeter, 1961). In essence, Schumpeter glorified the end products produced by the entrepreneur. However, in emphasizing the contribution of the wild spirits (“unternehmergeist”) of the entrepreneur to the “creative destruction” of the business cycle, Schumpeter put little emphasis on the process of negotiation as adding value to the economy or to leading to innovation in itself. This daring and innovative thinker was conspicuously silent regarding the potential for added value via the negotiation process. In essence, he treated it as a big black box in which a messy mystery occurs.

In recent decades, negotiation scholars have recognized that integratively oriented negotiations can lead to added value for each party in a negotiation (Raiffa, 2002) when, for example, parties value issues differently and make trade-offs that enable each side’s highest-priority issue to be met. Modern negotiation researchers specifically discuss creativity, evidenced in part by negotiators sharing priorities to discover potential trade-offs that are mutually satisfying as one of the important elements of good negotiations. For example, Raiffa (2002, pp. 83–84) has said: “[Joint decision-making negotiation] widens the scope of its vision to include the invention of strategies, creation of new alternatives, and increases or decreases in the number of parties.” As such, a century after Schumpeter’s groundbreaking work on innovation that focused on means of production, negotiation researchers have added the potential for further innovation through a new vision of the process of negotiation. Is the process of negotiation in the 21st century different from the negotiation process identified in earlier times? “Yes” is the answer generally suggested by this book’s chapters because so many contextual attributes of the workplace have changed over time (a point we turn to next). Since nearly all book contributors—including commentators Tsay and Bazerman (in Chapter 17), Gelfand and Gal (in Chapter 15), and Thompson, Richardson, and Lucas (in Chapter 16)—acknowledge that the management context has changed, it seems likely that there is need to rethink how (with these contextual changes in mind) managers in the 21st century workplace need to go about managing employees, including negotiating for support from employees for the types of outcomes managers seek—be these perceptions of fairness, feelings of trust, or behavioral cooperation that are among the variables examined by chapters in this book.

What are the contextual changes of the 21st century workplace to which we refer? As noted at the outset of our chapter, these include changes in organizational structure, the globalization of the marketplace, organizations’ reliance on virtual technologies as a means of communicating with employees as well as customers, and the increased cultural diversity of the workplace. Such changes have dramatically affected the negotiation landscape. For example, these changes have created flatter organizations (i.e., with fewer layers of authorities and more temporary, contract-based employees), which in turn tend to value individual skills over organizational structure. As another example, these changes have created more complex negotiations involving organizational representatives spread across the globe and more technologically mediated (fewer face-to-face) negotiations. These contextual workplace changes over time reward negotiators (and the organizations they represent) who are effective at negotiating and persuading international partners, using cultural knowledge to incorporate diverse points of view, and mastering virtual (non-face-to-face) channels or technical skills that are not necessarily equally understood by all parties. Technology also provides a multitude of options that were not available to negotiators in previous, less technologically reliant times, such as greater potential for knowledge (a)symmetry as information can be discovered via Internet-based networking sites. In a larger sense, much of innovation today is a collective enterprise that relies on exchange and negotiations (see Arthur, 2009). How might employees and managers benefit as negotiators from the changes across time that have occurred in “the workplace” (which in the digital age increasingly lacks a unitary location)? Collectively, our book aims to answer this question.

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KEY MESSAGES

More specifically, the chapters in Section 2 of this book illuminate the importance of employees (at all levels) enhancing perceptions of justice, or fairness, since these perceptions have consistently been linked to various forms of cooperation and other positive (relational and tangible) outcomes that help organizations and the units comprising them to function positively. The strategic importance of fairness in triggering cooperative types of behaviors is noted in Chapters 2–5; yet, each of these chapters differentially approaches this general tendency. More specifically, Chapter 2 by Donald Conlon and William Ross reviews the strategies that have theoretically and empirically been linked to higher levels of employees’ perceived justice (of various types) and describes how these strategies can also help negotiators achieve higher levels of perceived fairness of their actions. Importantly, these authors also caution readers to question the applicability of the fairness-enhancing tactics they describe in light of the fact that nearly all of these tactics fail to consider one of the hallmark attributes of the 21st century workplace: that social media now exists (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc.) that make it more difficult for managers as well as (prospective and current) employees to control (alone) the information that they may wish others to know about, hence making it potentially more difficult for either of these parties to utilize information in their negotiations in ways they might like. The challenges noted in this chapter thus suggest that future research on negotiation needs to be sensitive to social media channels that have generally been neglected in prior negotiation- and justice-related research.

Chapter 3, by Kathryn Roloff, Joel Brockner, and Batia Wiesenfeld, extends Conlon and Ross’s insights in Chapter 2 by alerting readers to the fact that fairness actions, even if taken, may not necessarily be perceived as authentic, and that perceived authenticity is essential if justice strategies (such as those reviewed in the prior chapter) are to have their typical cooperation-enhancing effects. These authors identify ways for negotiators to enhance their perceived authenticity, many of which require negotiators to have access to “rich” (face-to-face) cues involving nonverbal as well as verbal characteristics; yet, they note the difficulty of achieving perceived authenticity in the 21st century workplace, where employees (including managers) must increasingly: (a) interact without access to nonverbal cues that can aid perceptions of sincerity due to employees’ increased reliance on virtual (relatively “leaner”) communications and (b) interact with culturally diverse others whose “display rules” likely differ from their own, thereby complicating employees’ ability to be perceived as authentically fair or to similarly perceive another’s authenticity. As such, Roloff et al. identify the richness/leanness of communication media, the cultural diversity of negotiation participants, and negotiators’ perceptions of others’ authenticity as additional research needs.

The remaining two chapters in Section 2 reinforce and extend the insights of its initial chapters, first in the context of salary negotiation specifically (in Chapter 4 by Robin Pinkley) and next in a more general context in which outcomes of “subjective value” as well as “economic value” are sought (in Chapter 5 by Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Jared Curhan). More specifically, in Chapter 4, Robin Pinkley hones in on the salary negotiation context in particular and reviews the strategies that have traditionally been found to aid negotiators in obtaining the salary they seek. She notes that such strategies were identified in studies not characterized by some of the 21st century workplace characteristics today, such as increased cultural diversity of the workplace (in gender-based and nationally diverse ways) and increased use of online job applications (thus eliminating the richer information available in face-to-face negotiations) and access to salary data-related sites. In Chapter 5, Hillary Anger Elfenbein and Jared Curhan emphasize negotiators’ desire to experience “subjective value” (such as enhanced perceptions of fairness and feelings of respect, among other things) in addition to economic value (such as an attractive salary agreement). They identify possible actions for enhancing subjective value, yet note the need to test these speculations empirically for two reasons. These are the near absence of data that speak to their recommended actions and the likely challenges of using the strategies they identify in the 21st century workplace, where face-to-face negotiations are increasingly rare (due to organizations’ reliance on virtual work structures) and where flatter and more interdependent organizational structures are increasingly the norm, thereby potentially blurring the start and end of formal negotiations.

In contrast to Section 2, the chapters in Section 3 are devoted to issues associated with managing employees’ affect, moods, or emotions. More specifically, Chapter 6 by Russell Cropanzano, William Becker, and Jöel Feldman reviews how moods and emotions (which they are careful to distinguish) affect negotiation dynamics, Chapter 7 by Robert J. Bies and Thomas Tripp reviews literature regarding how negative affect and related behaviors such as anger and revenge affect cooperation, and Chapter 8 by Roy Lewicki and Ralph Hanke reviews literature regarding how deceptive strategies in negotiation affect feelings of distrust. Collectively, all three of these chapters illuminate the need for negotiators, hence also managers who must negotiate with their employees, to understand the role that affect of various kinds plays in determining how cooperative others will be and therefore how readily agreements can (or cannot) be negotiated. Given the tendency for more positive types of emotions to generally trigger more cooperative behaviors, the prescribed strategies in these chapters typically involve invoking positive (rather than negative) emotions. Importantly, these chapters each caution that achieving desired emotions may be more difficult in the 21st century workplace, where managers, as a result of increasingly remote work assignments, are increasingly less able to provide or read nonverbal cues that can aid in the building of mutual trust, and relatedly, they are less able to be the sole emotion manager due to social network-based information sources or other online, or “virtual,” communication channels. In summary, the insights of the chapters comprising Section 3 reinforce the need for future negotiation research to examine how virtual communication channels affect negotiation dynamics and add to the need for such research to include measures, hence observations, associated with negotiation participants’ affective states (of various kinds).

In Section 4 of this book, Chapters 9–11 explore the importance of employees (at all levels) managing social influences or group-sensitive phenomena. The need to do so is clearly identified by the social network perspective on negotiation provided in Chapter 9 (by Daniel J. Brass and Giuseppe Labianca). These authors note that few existing negotiation studies have investigated levels of analysis beyond the negotiating dyad, and...