Page 197 - DMGT519_Conflict Management and Negotiation Skills

Unit 9: Distributive Bargaining

Notes
Table 9.1: How Norms Can Be Used to Support an
Offer, or Evaluate a Counteroffer

In general, there are four major types of norms that might influence a negotiator’s behavior:
(1) relational norms, (2) fairness norms, (3) reciprocity norms, and (4) good faith bargaining.
Table 9.1 provides a summary of each norm and the basis upon which a negotiator will use it to
develop or react to a proposal.

9.6 Relational Norm

In a negotiation situation the parties may be involved in a strictly win-lose relationship, as
described earlier in this unit. They are concerned only with maximizing their outcomes. However,
in many real-world situations the parties often have a communal relationship—they are family,
friends, neighbors, or may have a continuing business or organizational connection.
Organizational cultures, like national cultures, can produce shared ideas and practices—causing
negotiators to seek the maintenance of long-term positive relationships even as they seek to
maximize their outcomes when negotiating. This desire is referred to as a relational norm and
can easily cause tension between the desire to maximize outcomes and the desire to maintain a
positive relationship.
Research on relational motives and norms indicates that, when present in a negotiation situation,
such norms can cause negotiators to overlook maximum outcomes in favor of suboptimal or
less efficient trades that are viewed as providing a more satisfying relationship. Perhaps the
most extreme application of relational norms occur in romantic relationships among
“negotiators” whose concern for the relationship far exceeds the desire to achieve maximum
exchange outcomes.

O. Henry’s classic 1905 story “The Gift of the Magi” describes the extreme romantic relational
situation in which a young couple each sacrifice their most prized possession, only to receive in
return something that has no practical value. O. Henry, however, might argue that the couple
made the wisest possible relational exchange (see Box 9.1).

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