Getting the Floor: Persistence, Motives, Strategy, and Individual Outcomes in Multi-party Negotiations

Social motives influence negotiators’ actions and reactions. In this study we propose and test hypotheses about the relationships between negotiators’ motives, their persistence in use of integrative and distributive strategies, and individual outcomes in four-person mixed-motive negotiations. Cooperative negotiators in this multi-party setting engaged in more integrative and less distributive strategies than individualistic negotiators. However, negotiators’ individual outcomes in this multi-party context were not a direct function of motives mediated by strategy, but a function of the interaction between social motive and negotiator strategy. The more persistent cooperative negotiators were in their use of integrative strategies, the better their individual outcomes, although the same was not true for individualistic negotiators.