Social Value Orientation and Perspective Taking in Integrative and Distributive Negotiations

Abstract

Two experiments explored the role of social motivation and perspective taking in integrative and distributive negotiations. It was tested whether perspective taking moderates the effect of social motivation on negotiation outcomes in integrative and distributive negotiations. In line with previous findings it was found that in an integrative negotiation setting (Experiment 1) pairs of negotiators with an egoistic motivation achieved weaker negotiation outcomes than pairs of negotiators with a prosocial motivation. However, when pairs of negotiators with an egoistic motivation where asked to take their counterpart's perspective during the negotiation, they did not differ in the quality of their achieved negotiation outcomes from pairs of negotiators with a prosocial motivation. In experiment 2, it was tested whether perspective taking moderates the effect of social motivation on negotiation outcomes within both integrative and distributive negotiation settings. Again, in an integrative negotiation setting pairs of negotiators with an egoistic motivation asked to take their counterpart's perspective achieved the same quality of negotiation outcomes as pairs of negotiators with a prosocial motivation. However, this was only true within an integrative negotiation setting. Within a distributive negotiation setting, pairs of negotiators with an egoistic motivation achieved weaker negotiation outcomes than pairs of negotiators with a prosocial motivation, irrespectively of whether they were asked to take their counterpart's perspective or not.