Imagine this. You are an expert on negotiation and organizational behavior. In fact, you are co‐author of the premier text in the field. You have been tapped as the next dean of your school. Your mission is to help it run smoothly and to lead it to new heights. And here is the kicker: it is a school of labor relations, so your colleagues think that they know a thing or two about negotiation themselves — likewise, your students and the alumni.
This is the story that our friend Bob McKersie tells in his lively contribution to this issue, “The Day‐to‐Day Life of a Dean.” He reflects on his experience at Cornell, drawing on both the diary that he kept at the time and his professional experience in the years that followed. He describes dealing with a steady stream of “hot‐button” issues affecting faculty, such as staffing and research support. But he also understood his work overall as a mega‐negotiation, an on going effort to build support for improvement and innovation. It was essential for him to use his political capital (and clout) judiciously.
McKersie is too generous a fellow to quote the old adage about university politics being so nasty because the stakes are so small. Roger Volkema and Cheryl Rivers do not use it either, although nasty politics is relevant to the topic of their article, “Beyond Frogs and Scorpions.” None of us want to get stung in negotiation, so we need to persuade counterparts that it does not pay for them to use unethical tactics. The authors offer a prospect theory–based framework for predicting unethical behavior that takes into account outcome and reputational impacts, both short and long term. Depending on circumstances, we might choose one or more of a dozen approaches to convince others that unethical negotiation behavior would not pay.
A quintet of Belgian researchers — Rachid Baitar, Ann Buysse, Ruben Brondeel, Jan de Mol, and Peter Rober — have ventured into another realm in which ethical boundaries are sometimes tested. Their report here, “Toward High Quality Divorce Agreements,” describes how the increasing use of mediation and more facilitative practices on the part of divorce attorneys in their country may be producing more durable, satisfactory marital settlements. As with similar studies elsewhere, the authors note that many factors are in play. People who engage in a consensual process may be predisposed to reaching an equitable agreement, for instance. Even so, it is noteworthy that divorce mediation and facilitative practice are gaining traction in Belgium and in other European countries.
In another article, Karin Hederos Eriksson and Anna Sandberg report on their research in Sweden on gender and the initiation of negotiation. Consistent with earlier studies, they found that men were more inclined to negotiate for salary, but digging deeper they found that this was driven in part by the gender of the other party. Specifically, when the counterpart was male, both men and women were equally likely to negotiate. Gender differences showed up only when the counterpart was female. The authors stress the importance of using a dyadic lens in analyzing when and how people initiate negotiation. Because of some intriguing differences between experimental results in the United States and their study, their work also raises questions about variations from country to country.
In that vein, Sujin Lee, Jeanne Brett, and Ji Hyearn Park caution us in their report here not to assume that all business managers in East Asia approach negotiation the same way. Their survey of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean managers revealed key differences in how respondents from each of these cultures construe social relationships and norms for both distributive and integrative bargaining tactics. While context matters in all three countries, they found variation in the particular kinds of relationships that are given special value. As a result, appeals and tactics that might succeed in one country could be less useful elsewhere.
Their research is complemented in this issue by Remigiusz Smolinski and Peter Kesting's article on teaching international negotiation long distance. Yes, there are technical challenges in setting up remote exercises, but they give students a foretaste of what they will experience in real‐life negotiations. And they certainly situate cross‐cultural issues in a way that is hard to replicate in most standard classrooms. For example, students have to grapple with managing different norms and miscommunication, topics that are not always sufficiently explored in standard debriefing. We hope that others will be inspired by the authors’ example.