Mindset-Oriented Negotiation Training (MONT): Teaching More Than Skills and Knowledge

From Claiming to Creating Value: The Psychology of Negotiations on Common Resource Dilemmas

Current sustainability challenges often reflect common resource dilemmas where peoples’ short-term self-interests are at odds with collective interests in the present and future. In this article, we highlight the key role of joint decision-making processes in negotiations to facilitate the management of common resource dilemmas and to promote the transition toward sustainability. By reflecting on psychological drivers and barriers, we argue that the limited availability, the restricted accessibility, and the dynamic alterability of resources in negotiations on common resource dilemmas may cause a myopic mindset that fosters value claiming strategies and, ultimately, results in distributive-consumptive negotiation outcomes. To promote value creation in negotiations on common resource dilemmas, we argue that agents must perform a mindset shift with an inclusive social identity on a superordinate group level, an embracive prosocial motivation for other parties’ interests at and beyond the table, and a forward-looking cognitive orientation towards long-term consequences of their joint decisions. By shifting their mindset from a myopic towards a holistic cognitive orientation, agents may explore negotiation strategies to create value through increasing the availability, improving the accessibility, and using the alterability of resources. Applying these value creation strategies may help achieve integrative-transformative negotiation outcomes and promote sustainable agreements aimed at intersectional, interlocal, and intergenerational justice. We conclude by discussing additional psychological factors that play a pivotal role in negotiations on common resource dilemmas as well as further developments for future research.

Toward a Better Understanding of the Mindsets of Negotiators

Abstract. This article introduces and discusses the 15-item Scale for the Integrative Mindset (SIM) of negotiators, that is of people involved in joint decision-making processes. The scale is based on the integrative mindset ( Ade, Schuster, Harinck, & Trötschel, 2018 ), which describes a set of three inclinations of parties approaching negotiations: a collaborative, a curious, and a creative one. Using a first sample ( N = 1,030) of online survey participants, we provide evidence for a high psychometric quality of the SIM as suggested by high reliabilities and good fit indices. We also compare the SIM with scales that measure well-known and possibly related psychological constructs and show the SIM’s distinction to them. Using a second sample ( N = 417), we show how the SIM differs from a Scale on Inappropriate Negotiation Strategies (SINS) that has been used in previous negotiation research. The findings of the present studies are discussed with respect to potential applications of the SIM in experimental research.