Social Motive as a Moderator of the Concession Timing Effect and the Critical Role of Trust

초록

The current study investigates how focal negotiators' social motive and their expectations about the negotiation partner's social motive interact to influence trust, satisfaction, and judgments in response to concessions from the other party. Prior research has demonstrated the "concession timing effect," whereby immediate, rather than gradual, concessions reduce negotiators' satisfaction with and evaluations of negotiation outcomes. Across two studies, we propose that this effect depends on negotiators' expectations about their partner's social motive, as these expectations shape the extent to which negotiators engage in counterfactual thinking about whether better outcomes could have been obtained. We find that the concession timing effect emerges when a negotiation partner is expected to have an individualistic motive, but is attenuated when the partner is expected to have a cooperative motive. In addition, trust mediates the effect of negotiators' expectations of the other party's social motive on the concession timing effect. Further, this moderated mediation effect occurs only when focal negotiators themselves have a cooperative social motive. These findings contribute to research on negotiation, trust, and counterfactual thinking by showing when and why concession timing shapes negotiators' reactions to outcomes.

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