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Chapter 9
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.
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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.”
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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.
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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
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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.