Unethical Negotiating: Causes and Consequences

Abstract

Why do negotiators act unethically, and what happens when they do? Despite one research stream highlighting broad consensus about the types of negotiation behaviors considered unethical (e.g., Lewicki & Robinson, 1998; Robinson, Lewicki, & Donahue, 2000) and another documenting the causes and consequences of unethical behavior outside of negotiations (e.g., Moore & Gino, 2015; Zhong, Gino, & Bazerman, 2014), surprisingly few attempts have been made to detail the causes and consequences of unethical negotiation behavior. This is problematic because it contributes to the rather stale viewpoint that unethical negotiation behavior is both inevitable and uniformly harmful. It also impedes progress in both the negotiation and the ethics literatures and limits our field's ability to train ethical negotiators. The current symposium seeks to bridge the theoretical disconnect and thereby contribute to ethical negotiation in the real world. We propose to convene four scholarly teams, each of which will offer a unique viewpoint on the causes and/or consequences of unethical negotiation behavior. Each symposium paper will draw from the parallel, burgeoning, and related literatures on negotiation and ethics to advance a unique perspective and challenge these two literatures to actively engage with each other, offering important suggestions and highlighting pressing areas for future research. Collectively, the papers will suggest that unethical behavior is neither inevitable nor necessarily detrimental in negotiation.