Communication Dynamics in Negotiation

Abstract: This symposium brings together leading scholars to examine how communication shapes negotiation processes and outcomes across multiple dimensions. While negotiation research has traditionally emphasized structural factors and outcome variables, this collection of presentations foregrounds communication as the central mechanism through which negotiations unfold, adapt, and conclude. The symposium begins by establishing the foundational role of language in negotiation research, tracing its evolution from early studies of threats and promises to contemporary work on linguistic matching and metaphor. Building on this foundation, we examine temporal dynamics, exploring how negotiators' moment-to-moment strategy choices and sequences create value and navigate setbacks. The third presentation extends our analysis beyond verbal communication to nonverbal channels, examining how affiliation, emotion, dominance, and deception detection operate through body language, facial expressions, and paralinguistic cues. Moving from individual-level processes to contextual influences, the symposium then addresses culture's impact on negotiation communication through both cultural effects and cultural relations paradigms, highlighting micro-elements, interaction dynamics, and meaning systems. The fifth presentation considers how communication media, from face-to-face interaction to emerging AI-enabled technologies, shape negotiation processes and outcomes, revealing person- and context-related determinants of media choice. The symposium concludes by integrating these perspectives through an examination of relational development in diplomatic negotiations, demonstrating how verbal and nonverbal messages signal affiliation and interdependence, influence turning points and framing, and sustain longer-term relationships. Together, these presentations advance theoretical and methodological pluralism in negotiation research while maintaining conceptual rigor in an era of rapidly evolving communication technologies and practices.

Keywords: communication, negotiation, multilevel, temporal, relationships