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This special issue of the International Journal of Conflict Management is devoted to teaching materials for classes on negotiation and dispute resolution. We decided to devote an issue to teaching materials for two reasons. On the supply side, there are very few outlets for good teaching materials. Except for those connected to major case publishing outlets such as the Program on Negotiation (PON) at Harvard or the Dispute Resolution Center (DRC) at Kellogg, most people who develop new cases and simulations have no way to let the wider scholarly community know about their materials. On the demand side, there is always a need for innovation and change in teaching. Indeed, it is probably safe to assume that people would not be developing new materials if they found exactly what they needed in established sources. While PON, the DRC, and the major books on negotiation (e.g., Lewicki, Saunders, Minton, & Barry, 2003; Thompson, 2000; Currall, Geddes, Schmidt, & Hockner, 1993; Murnighan, 1993) are all extremely good, these sources can not meet everyone's teaching needs. This special issue includes seven papers that offer new ideas for cases and exercises. We hope that these will enliven and enrich your classroom experiences.

This paper aims to discuss professionals working in partnership with family carers and the importance of learning from their experiences in designing and delivering support to themselves and people with dementia.

Working in partnership with carers is a key goal of policy and practice. This paper demonstrates how this can work in practice.

Key issues are synthesized, drawing on the stories of three carers who shared their stories as part of the original conference workshop on which the paper is based.

Lessons for professionals about the nature of the dementia caring journey and dimensions of good practice are highlighted.

With the increased emphasis on emotions in negotiation, an exercise is presented which can be used with a simulated negotiation to develop emotional skills. Linking research on the role of emotions in negotiation to emotional intelligence, we propose a set of activities to develop greater awareness, understanding, and ability to manage emotions while negotiating. The teaching note explains how to use two worksheets, one before and one during the simulation. Headings on the worksheets correspond to levels of emotional intelligence. Suggestions for debriefing along with supporting literature are provided.

State leaders’ decision-making calculus is often attributed to external factors. The political arena, international community pressure and a country’s military stance all take centre stage in the analysis of national security decisions. Little weight is given to personal aspects of a leader’s psyche in explaining these decisions; this is true to the bulk of the research regarding this topic. This study theorizes and tests a positive link between Israeli leaders’ combat military experience and their propensity to enter into ‘peacemaking’ decisions namely, peace talks, cease fires and unilateral withdrawals. This research uses a new database comprising all peacemaking decision points in Israel’s history, looking at the pressure put on a leader from outside factors and his military experience to explain the decision taken. It finds a strong significant link between combat experience and the tendency to enter in a peacemaking decision with little regard to ideological affiliation, shedding a new light on Israeli politicians from both sides of the aisle.

This paper investigates the relationship between divestiture activity and subsequent acquisition deal-making. We argue that the divestiture activity of firms influences their acquisition behavior through corporate restructuring learning effects and enhanced strategic flexibility. These organizational spillovers affect not only the degree of risk acquirers are ready to take but also their ability to effectively negotiate with the target firm. We test the existence of organizational spillovers for an international sample of 4,795 acquirers for the period 1990–2008 and get support for our theoretical predictions.

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to examine the effect of accountability pressure as a monitoring control tool to mitigate subordinates' propensity to create budgetary slack. The results suggest that budgetary slack is (lowest) highest when accountability pressure is (present) absent under a private information situation. The results further reveal that accountability pressure is positively associated with subordinates' perceived levels of honesty, which in turn is negatively associated with budgetary slack creation. The findings of this paper have important theoretical and practical implications for budgetary control systems design.

Culture profoundly influences how people think, communicate, and behave. Successful cross‐cultural negotiations require an understanding of the negotiation style of those on the other side of the table, and the acceptance and respect of their cultural beliefs and norms. The focus of this paper is to identify the styles of negotiation that tend to be adopted by Brazilian negotiators. Participants were 683 experienced negotiators from 22 Brazilian states. The Brazilian style of negotiation is described based on seven culturally sensitive dimensions that are present in negotiations: the nature of the activity, the role of the individual, uncertainty and time, communication, trust, protocol, and outcomes.

In this investigation, the authors aim to ask whether engineers, as a profession, share distinct characteristics in their attitudes and behaviors relating to negotiations. Based on a review of the literature, the authors answer in the affirmative. Generally speaking, the existing studies on individual differences of engineers conclude that they are more conscientious, more goal-driven, more competitive and less people-oriented than non-engineers. The authors suggest that these differences have significant consequences on how engineers engage in negotiations. In particular, the authors propose that engineers’ approach to negotiation includes differences related to distributive versus integrative negotiation, emotional intelligence, perspective-taking and preferred persuasion techniques.

This paper involves an integrated literature review, combining research in management, psychology and engineering to investigate whether engineers approach negotiations differently from non-engineers.

The authors suggest that individual differences between engineers and non-engineers have significant consequences for how engineers engage in negotiations. In particular, the authors propose that engineers’ approach to negotiation includes differences related to distributive versus integrative negotiation, emotional intelligence, perspective-taking and preferred persuasion techniques.

The authors offer 11 research propositions in areas relating to how engineers engage in distributive versus integrative negotiations, emotional intelligence, perspective-taking and their preferred persuasive techniques.

There are important implications for how engineers and their supervisors should be aware of these differences between how engineers and non-engineers view negotiations and how these differences may affect them and their employing organizations. There are also cultural implications, particularly for organizations for which engineers comprise a majority or a minority of the workforce composition.

There are important implications for diversity in the engineering profession, especially as it relates to the hiring of women in engineering (as they now comprise a small minority of the profession).

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that investigates how engineers negotiate. Because engineering is a hugely important contributor to society, the results of this have important implications for the society.