The Future of Business Negotiations – Current Trends and New Perspectives on Negotiation Behavior

Today’s business world is driven by megatrends, affecting multiple aspects of future society, economy and technology. Their impacts can be expected for all areas in companies and therefore will most likely occur in business negotiations. Although several studies address future developments of different business divisions, the impact of megatrends on negotiations has, thus far, not been analyzed. To demonstrate possible impacts on negotiations, we designed a model including the four megatrends: digitalization, globalization, individualization and demographic change, which we expect to have main effects on specific negotiation aspects. We conducted an empirical study surveying practitioners to provide a first broad view of how megatrends impact business negotiations with the aim to encourage further investigation into this new research field and contribute to the development of new methods and topics. First results confirm our model, indicating that different aspects of negotiations are affected by particular megatrends.