What predicts willingness to negotiate again? The role of collective emotional expressions and cooperative intentions

Keywords: Emotional Expressions, Positivity Ratio, Willingness to Negotiate Again, Mixed-Motive Negotiations

Abstract: A social function view of emotions suggests that emotional expressions make negotiations easier to manage by providing information about intentions, priorities, limits, and likely future behaviors. We introduce the concept of the “positivity ratio” to the negotiation context, a measure of the collective emotional expressions, as important to mixed-motive negotiations between colleauges. We hypothesize that the positivity ratio will be pertinent to workplace negotiations. Study 1 and 2 provide initial evidence that the positivity ratio enhanced a counterpart's willingness to negotiate again but has no effect on attained outcomes. Study 2 shows that the positivity ratio is related to cooperative intentions and perceptions. A negotiator's pre-negotiation cooperative intentions predicted the positivity ratio during negotiations, while competitive intentions had no such effects. Further, the correlation between the positivity ratio and a counterpart’s willingness to subsequently negotiate is mediated by the counterpart’s perceptions that the negotiator was cooperative. Implications are discussed.