Inter-Team Negotiation Support, Coalition Formation, and Negotiation Outcomes: An Empirical Study

This chapter is an attempt to investigate the role of negotiation support systems (NSS) in supporting inter-team negotiations, which have become commonplace for today’s business negotiations. Inter-team negotiations differ from simple dyadic negotiations, and are associated with enormous complexity introduced by the negotiating team dynamics. When there are three or more members in a negotiating team, coalition formation by team members stands out as an intriguing phenomenon, of which cultural diversity is a primary antecedent. NSS through altering coalition formation dynamics have important impacts on various negotiation outcomes. An experiment was conducted to test the authors’ research model and hypotheses. A content analysis was undertaken to measure the extent of coalition formation. Besides the quantitative approach, a qualitative analysis was also conducted to further enhance our exploratory efforts in examining the phenomenon. The results provide initial evidence of the usefulness of NSS in supporting inter-team negotiations, and have both theoretical and practical implications.