Process gains in team negotiations by means of the explicit assignment of subtasks

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Negotiating teams are increasingly used in negotiations because it is expected that they achieve better outcomes than individual negotiators. By contrast, our own research shows that (a) the economic outcomes of negotiating teams are of often only as good as those of the most successful individuals within the teams would be and (b) the relationship between the negotiation parties is especially strained through the use of negotiating teams. The current research intends to study the conditions where (a) negotiating teams in fact achieve better economic outcomes than their most successful members without (b) necessarily straining the socio-emotional negotiation outcomes. The main working hypothesis of the project implies that negotiating teams achieve better economic outcomes if the subtasks of the negotiation are explicitly assigned to different team members. Thereby, teams can make use of their higher potential compared to individual negotiators. The current project tests this hypothesis in three complex laboratory experiments with 882 participants in total. In these experiments, the explicit assignment of subtasks to team members is systematically varied and the consequences of this variation are studied in complex negotiation simulations using various analyses (including analyses of film data).