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Negotiators are offered limited advice on how to overcome adverse events. Drawing on resilience and coping literatures, this study aims to test the impact of three cognitive processing strategies on negotiators’ subjective and economic value following adversity.

Participants completed two negotiations with the same partner. The difficulty of the first negotiation was manipulated and tested how cognitive processing of this experience influenced subjective and economic outcomes in the second negotiation.

Subjective and economic outcomes were predicted by negotiators’ affect, their cognitive processing strategy and negotiation difficulty. In difficult negotiations, as positive affect increased, proactive processing decreased self-satisfaction. As negative affect increased, affective processing increased satisfaction with relationship and process.

Cognitive processing of adversity is most effective when emotions are not running high and better able to protect relationship- and process-oriented satisfaction than outcome-oriented satisfaction. The findings apply to one specific type of adversity and to circumstances that do not generate strong emotions.

This research tests which of three cognitive processing strategies is best able to prevent the aftermath of a difficult negotiation from spilling over into subsequent negotiations. Two forms of proactive processing are more effective than immersive processing in mitigating the consequences.

The purpose of this study is to test how individuals’ emotion reactions (fear vs anger) to expressed anger influence their intended conflict management styles. It investigates two interventions for managing their reactions: hot vs cold processing and enhancing conflict self-efficacy.

Hypotheses were tested in two experiments using an online simulation. After receiving an angry or a neutral message from a coworker, participants either completed a cognitive processing task (E1) or a conflict self-efficacy task (E2), and then self-reported their emotions, behavioral activation/inhibition and intended conflict management styles.

Fear is associated with enhanced behavioral inhibition, which results in greater intentions to avoid and oblige and lower intentions to dominate. Anger is associated with enhanced behavioral activation, which results in greater intentions to integrate and dominate, as well as lower intentions to avoid and oblige. Cold (vs hot) processing does not reduce fear or reciprocal anger but increasing individuals’ conflict self-efficacy does.

The studies measured intended reactions rather than behavior. The hot/cold manipulation effect was small, potentially limiting its ability to diminish emotional responses.

These results suggest that increasing employees’ conflict self-efficacy can be an effective intervention for helping them manage the natural fear and reciprocal anger responses when confronted by others expressing anger.

Enhancing self-efficacy beliefs is more effective than cold processing (stepping back) for managing others’ anger expressions. By reducing fear, enhanced self-efficacy diminishes unproductive responses (avoiding, obliging) to a conflict.

Using a simulated employment negotiation, this experiment examined the relationship between dyad composition, negotiation strategies and levels of joint gain. Three dyad types were created on the basis of social value orientation, proself, prosocial and mixed. A log linear analysis showed that dyads were differentiated on the basis of the strategies associated with high joint gain. We identified a generic path to high joint gain in which all dyads increased priority information and decreased contention. Overlaid on this path, we identified dyad‐specific strategies and strategy sequences associated with high joint gain. Cooperative reciprocity was critical to high joint gain only in prosocial dyads. When dyads contained at least one prosocial negotiator, process management played an important role in determining the level of joint gain. When dyads contained at least one proself negotiator, the sequences associated with high joint gain functioned to divide resources.

This research proposes and evaluates hypotheses about patterns of communication in a multi‐party, multi‐issue negotiation. Data were from 36 four‐person groups. We found that the majority of groups initiated negotiations with a distributive phase and ended with an integrative phase—strong support for Morley and Stephenson's (1979) rational model of negotiation. We identified transitions between both strategic orientations (integration, distribution) and strategic functions (action, information), but found that the first transition was more likely to result in a change of orientation than of function and that negotiators were more likely to change either orientation or function (single transition) than to change both aspects of the negotiation simultaneously (double transition). Finally, we determined that negotiators used process and closure strategies to interrupt distributive phases and redirect negotiations to an integrative phase.

Understanding how dyadic negotiations and group decision processes evolve over time requires specifying the basic elements of process, modeling the configuration of those elements over time, and providing a theoretical explanation for that configuration. We propose a bead metaphor for conceptualizing the basic elements of the group negotiation process and then “string” the beads of behavior in a helix framework to model the process by which group negotiations evolve. Our theorizing draws on the group decision development literature (e.g. Bales, 1953; Poole, 1981, 1983a, b; Poole & Roth, 1989a, b) as well as on the negotiation process literature (e.g. Gulliver, 1979; Morley & Stephenson, 1977). Our examples are from our Towers Market studies of negotiating groups.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether women encounter more social resistance than men do when they attempt to negotiate for higher compensation, and whether the gender and personality of the interviewer moderates that resistance.

The authors conducted an experiment to explore how gender and personality jointly influence interviewers’ decision making in job negotiations.

The authors found that: first, female interviewees who initiate negotiations in a job interview are penalized by both male and female interviewers; second, more agreeable interviewers are “nicer” than less agreeable ones to interviewees who ask for more pay, even after controlling for the interviewers’ gender; and third, more extraverted interviewers are “tougher” than less extraverted interviewers toward interviewees who initiate salary negotiation. These phenomena are more pronounced when interviewees are male as opposed to female.

Some limitations need to be brought to the reader’s attention. First, the participants of this study are undergraduate students. While most of them have job interview experience as an interviewee, few have any experience as an interviewer. In order to minimize this effect, we used human resources management students who previously had a course on hiring and selection in this experiment. Second, the order of the interviewees evaluated by participants, acting as interviewers, could cause an “order effect.”

This study contributes to the gender, personality, and negotiations literature, and “fills the gap” on the joint effect of gender, personality, and hiring decision making. Gender discrimination during job interviews suggests that business needs to address discrimination and diversity issues earlier. It may be wise for management to consider the potential bias of an interviewer’s gender and personality on their hiring decisions before the organization makes a final decision on which interviewee should be hired and how much salary should be offered.

To the best of the knowledge of the authors, no prior studies have explored the joint effect of gender and personality on negotiation behavior in a job interview setting from an interviewer’s perspective.

The theme of this keynote address is conceptual puzzles raised by empirical research on conflict management and resolution. Three types of puzzles are highlighted: those that deal with processes, identities, and situations. The process puzzles include some counter‐intuitive implications of negotiating strategies and interaction process dynamics. The identity puzzles include the ways in which identity is negotiated, perceptions of ingroups and outgroups, and the connection between loyalty to groups and collective action. The situation puzzles address attribution issues, the distinction between passive actors and active agents, and the role of history. An attempt is then made to juxtapose the puzzles toward a larger conception of a field that emphasizes change in the phenomena we analyze in research and shape through practice. A number of these ideas are found also in the research of previous IACM lifetime award recipients, with whom connections are made.