The Differential Roles of Respect and Trust on Negotiation

This study examines the effect trust and respect has on the strategies used to negotiate, as well as the outcomes of that negotiation for dyads engaged in a complex bargaining task. Trust is the degree to which people believe in the honesty and benevolence of their opponents, while respect is the degree to which people hold their opponents in high regard for their values. We expected that trust and respect would differentially affect the strategies used to negotiate, the rate of impasse, the creativity of agreements, and the way in which the climate was perceived. We found primarily that trust affected the strategies used (which subsequently affected the agreement's creativity), while the respect-trust interaction affected the agreement's creativity directly. We also found independent effects for respect and trust on the perceived climate of the negotiation. Nothing (including control variables) affected the rate of impasse. We use the results to argue for a more theoretically sophisticated view of relationships and negotiations, and discuss the particular implications of the findings for the theory and practice of negotiations