Negotiation as Social Interaction

Why negotiators fail to find and implement mutually beneficial solutions is a central question in negotiation research. In answering this question, researchers have often focused on how situational and cognitive factors shape negotiators’ outcomes. The relationship between negotiators’ strategies and their subsequent outcomes is relatively less well investigated, although no less informative. In this article, I focus on post-1990 research to highlight some of the insights obtained from exploring communication processes in dyadic negotiations. This discussion identifies not only the need for further research in this field, but also the need to improve our understanding of how dyad composition and social cognition shape the negotiation process and outcomes.