I Wasn’t Expecting That! The Relational Impact of Negotiation Strategy Expectation Violations

Abstract

While negotiation within ongoing buyer-supplier relationships is a key element in supply chain management, the emphasis in the literature has been on one-time, isolated event negotiations. This research, through three scenario-based experiments with supply chain managers, considers how buyers' perceptions of past negotiation strategies help to develop future negotiation strategy expectations of their suppliers. If the buyers' strategy expectations are not met (violated) by the suppliers, these buyers will seek to understand why. Using the combination of expectancy violation theory and attribution theory, this research examines the relational impact of a negotiation strategy expectation violation and the role of extra-relational factors. The results suggest that relationship history does influence how buyers respond to negotiation strategy expectation violations and that the relational impact of a negative violation is tempered by the history as opposed to a single event reaction. While the findings support that extra-relational factors can also have a relational impact, buyers perceive differences based on the type of extra-relational factor (organizational or external) and the type of relational outcome (commitment and relationship value). The results of the interaction of the strategy expectation violation and extra-relational factor may stretch the boundary conditions of attribution theory. The findings suggest that suppliers should consider how their buying partners may perceive their negotiation behavior and determine the potential relational ramifications of behavior outside of the buyers' expectations based on previous exchanges.

Narratives in supplier negotiations—The interplay of narrative design elements, structural power, and outcomes

“…Negotiation outcomes are broadly affected by two factors: the structural attributes of the negotiating parties and the influence tactics used by these parties. The first set of factors, structural attributes, includes the power balance (Bjørgum et al, 2021;Ganesan, 1993), relationship types (Kaufmann, Esslinger, & Carter, 2018;Zachariassen, 2008), and relationship histories (Thomas et al, 2015(Thomas et al, , 2021. These structural attributes are recognized as frame-setting, contextual factors for a negotiation.…”

“…For suppliers with low expectations of their potential outcomes, this approach could have created a perception that they actually were in a better position than they had assumed. This approach by the more powerful buyer could create a mismatch between expected and observed negotiation behavior (Thomas et al, 2021) and thus provoke the supplier to actually increase expectations regarding economic negotiation outcomes.…”

“…Instead, a narrative comprises a set of elements that occur in conjunction and that, in complex ways, can lead to different negotiation outcomes. In line with recent negotiation research in the field of SCM, we include relational and economic negotiation outcomes in our investigation (Thomas et al, 2021).…”

“…We further conducted realism checks (Dabholkar, 1994; Thomas et al, 2021), asking participants to indicate their perceptions about whether the scenario was realistic and whether they took their role seriously. Participants answered three questions on a 7‐point Likert‐type scale ranging from 1 (“ strongly disagree ”) to 7 (“ strongly agree ”), with the following results: (1) “I had no difficulty imagining myself in the situation” ( x̄ = 6.04, std.…”

“…In fact, they represent “the heart and core” of supply chain management (SCM) (Zachariassen, 2008, p. 764). By influencing each other during negotiations, buyers and suppliers seek favorable agreements on a variety of factors, including product specification, price, delivery, and payment terms (Thomas et al, 2021). In addition to their economic outcomes, negotiations also can have psychological consequences, such as satisfaction with the negotiation, and relational consequences, such as trust in a partner (Thomas et al, 2018).…”