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Social and Behavioral Sciences

Selected Works

Mara Olekalns

Selected Works

Trust in Negotiation

Articles 1 - 7 of 7

Full-Text Articles in Business

Maybe It’S Right, Maybe It’S Wrong: Structural And Social Determinants Of Deception In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Chris Horan, Philip Smith Dec 2012

Maybe It’S Right, Maybe It’S Wrong: Structural And Social Determinants Of Deception In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Chris Horan, Philip Smith

Mara Olekalns

Context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. Focusing on negotiators use of deception, we used a simulated two-party negotiation to test how three contextual variables - regulatory focus, power, and trustworthiness - interacted to shift negotiators’ ethical thresholds. We demonstrated that these three variables interact to either inhibit or activate deception, providing support for an interactionist model of ethical decision-making. Three patterns emerged from our analyses. First, low power inhibited and high power activated deception. Second, promotion-focused negotiators favored sins of omission whereas prevention-focused negotiators favored sins of commission. Third, low cognition-based trust influenced deception when negotiators …


Maybe It’S Right, Maybe It’S Wrong: Structural And Social Determinants Of Deception In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns Dec 2012

Maybe It’S Right, Maybe It’S Wrong: Structural And Social Determinants Of Deception In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns

Mara Olekalns

Context shapes negotiators’ actions, including their willingness to act unethically. Focusing on negotiators use of deception, we used a simulated two-party negotiation to test how three contextual variables - regulatory focus, power, and trustworthiness - interacted to shift negotiators’ ethical thresholds. We demonstrated that these three variables interact to either inhibit or activate deception, providing support for an interactionist model of ethical decision-making. Three patterns emerged from our analyses. First, low power inhibited and high power activated deception. Second, promotion-focused negotiators favored sins of omission whereas prevention-focused negotiators favored sins of commission. Third, low cognition-based trust influenced deception when negotiators …


Negotiations And Trust, Mara Olekalns, Philip L. Smith Dec 2011

Negotiations And Trust, Mara Olekalns, Philip L. Smith

Mara Olekalns

This forthcoming entry in the Encyclopaedia of Peace Psychology provides an overview of trust in negotiation


But Can I Trust Her? Gender And Expectancy Violations In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Carol Kulik, Dasha Simonov, Carolyn Bradshaw Dec 2010

But Can I Trust Her? Gender And Expectancy Violations In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Carol Kulik, Dasha Simonov, Carolyn Bradshaw

Mara Olekalns

Women who negotiate incur social backlash, being perceived as more pushy and demanding than women who do not negotiate. In two experiments, we test the boundary conditions for this backlash effect. Using a simulated employment contract negotiation, we explore how the strategies that women use, who they negotiate with (E1) and the organizational context within which they negotiate (E2) affects one social outcome, women’s perceived trustworthiness. We compare the how men and women evaluate the use of a gender-congruent accommodating style or a a gender-incongruent, competing style (E1) in either an agentic or a communal organizational culture (E2). In both …


Mindsets: Sensemaking And Transition In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Philip L. Smith Dec 2009

Mindsets: Sensemaking And Transition In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Philip L. Smith

Mara Olekalns

A negotiation’s opening moments are characterized by high levels of uncertainty. During this phase, individuals screen each other’s behavior for clues about underlying goals and motives. Much of this information is conveyed implicitly by the language that negotiators use. The words they choose and the way they respond to the other party provide important clues about negotiators’ dominant goals and strategy preferences. At the same time, negotiators use incoming information to assess the other party’s intentions. In negotiation, this uncertainty resolves itself into questions about the other party’s trustworthiness. Because negotiations are characterized by a vulnerability to the actions of …


The Relational Foundations Of Strategic Choice In Negotiation, Mara Olekalns, Philip Smith Dec 2006

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.


Resolving The Empty Core: Trust As A Determinant Of Outcomes In Three-Party Negotiations, Mara Olekalns, Feyona Lau, Philip Smith Dec 2006

Resolving The Empty Core: Trust As A Determinant Of Outcomes In Three-Party Negotiations, Mara Olekalns, Feyona Lau, Philip Smith

Mara Olekalns

This research examined how trust affected resource allocation in a 3-party negotiation. Negotiators were presented with an empty core problem in which their theoretical share of resources exceeded the resources available for distribution. We tested which of three components of trust – reliability, predictability and empathy – predicted negotiators’ outcomes. We distinguished between absolute and relative trust. We found that relative trust was a more consistent predictor of individual outcomes than absolute trust and that the most trusted party in a network obtained the highest individual outcomes. This finding highlights the importance of social context in shaping trust judgements. The …