Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Relational Foundations Of Strategic Choice In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Philip Smith

Mara Olekalns

Representing negotiations as social exchanges highlights negotiators’ implicit obligations to honor exchanges and the risk that they will fail to do so. Based on their representation of the underlying relationship, negotiators are oriented to one of four relational risks (failures in reliability, predictability, benevolence or integrity). The salience of a specific relational risk shifts negotiators’ strategic focus and elicits a distinct strategic cluster (deterrence, co-ordination, obligation, collaboration) aimed at offsetting or neutralizing these relational risks.