PTA as a Weak Point? – The Impact of Perspective Taking Ability in Negotiations with Unequal Power Distribution

Perspective taking ability is one the most prominent predictors for outcome in the research field of integrative bargaining. Although, numerous research has investigated and acknowledged the importance of PTA, scarce information regarding its effect upon specific bargaining situations is available. Thus, it is surprising that PTA was never examined in one of the most often occurring negotiation settings, that is, power imbalance between the parties involved. Accordingly, the study at hand investigates the impact of PTA in such situations by arranging a buyer-seller negotiation conducted with students from university management courses. Therefore, individual outcome was analyzed by means of independent-samples t-test in order to find differences between the performance of high PTA negotiators and low PTA negotiators in high power positions. A pre-test reveals that PTA indeed reduces a negotiator’s individual performance in a high-power position. As this is a work in progress study, final results are expected in April 2018.