The Need to Standardly Assess How Dispute-resolvers Reach Agreement

Abstract

Research has shown that the substance of communication in a negotiation significantly influences how effective that negotiation will be at persuading people, in particular, to cease blocking goals others wish to pursue. Brett, Shapiro, and Lytle (1998) conducted a study in which they audio-recorded and then transcribed a dispute-resolving simulation-based study and examined the effects of the communication qualities of both parties on negotiation outcomes. Brett et al.’s content analysis of the parties’ conversations found that agreements tended to be higher in quality (i.e., more equally beneficial to both sides, hence more integrative) when parties’ dialogue: (1) had a more significant proportion of communications that were “interest-oriented” (i.e., focused on meeting the needs or concerns of both sides) and (2) had a lower proportion of communications that were “rights-oriented” (i.e., focused on meeting the needs of one side via the use of ideological justifications) or “power-oriented” (i.e., focused on meeting the needs of one side via the issuance of threats designed to coerce concessions). Brett et al. concluded that when interest-oriented remarks accompany rights- and power-oriented remarks, this message of caring de-escalates the typical consequences of escalating either rights- or power-oriented remarks alone. To our knowledge, no study has attempted to replicate and extend Brett et al.’s findings. In this direction, this study extensively examined the effects of interests-, rights-, and power-oriented remarks in negotiation by using a newly developed and validated measure of these remarks. Towards this goal, we present a valid and reliable instrument that can measure the communication qualities of negotiators and/or disputing parties across different negotiation settings. Overall, this study presents the findings to demonstrate that our measure is the first measure of interests-, rights-, or power dimensions that pass psychometric standards for validity and reliability. Future research can adopt this measure to examine the effects of these strategies on negotiation outcomes. Having this measure will enable findings to accumulate across conflict managing-related studies and inform employees across all levels of the hierarchy how to effectively transform their goal-related disagreements into agreements when these inevitably occur in negotiation.